(Not Just) Firefox’s “Pile of Poo” Easter Egg: 💩

For a reason best known to the Unicode consortium, there is now the symbol U+1F4A9 “Pile of Poo”: 💩. If you happen to create a web page with this delightful character in the title, Firefox does something special:

Yep, that’s a smiley face poo, a bit like Mr Hankey. Oh dear.

Actually, it seems it might be an OS X Emoji thing, because Safari renders it in the title like that, and in the text as (enlarged to show texture):

iOS has it covered too:

Blackberry’s browser just shows a small black square. Android, rather sensibly, shows an empty square. It must be an Apple thing.

“Thanks” go to tchrist‘s comment in unicode – Why does modern Perl avoid UTF-8 by default? for alerting me to this character, and letting us know about the Symbola font that supports it. Yeah, cheers Tom …

2 comments

  1. How did you enlarge the symbol without it pixelating? I am trying to use the ‘old man’ symbol for something and and have been wondering if there’s a way to enlarge it, using code, without distorting the image.

  2. I just put the character in a draft post (using Character Viewer) and then zoomed the text as far as I could in Safari. Or you can use Textedit, and insert them at 72pt.

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