Should you ever be worried that displaying just one glyph could take almost 2 seconds and slow down your website by as much? Naw, of course not. This wasn’t a problem already in the 1980s and, in the lord’s year 2026, computers are pretty good at rendering a letter or a symbol at a moment’s notice.

Ha. I was just messing with you. Of course you should always be worried about fonts. All the time. Typography is beautiful, but fonts are brutal. They will constantly put you to the test, they will find ways to get out of alignment faster than a Zastava Yugo, and they will teach you about corner cases in places you didn’t even realize had edges.

Fonts will break your heart like it’s the month before the prom again, and again, and again.

Or, in Allen Pike’s case, break a heart somewhat literally. Pike wrote a nice quick story of the complexity of what needed to happen to show the heart emoji, and how under a very specific set of conditions – a certain browser, a certain emoji font, a certain emoji within that font – this led to an extreme slowdown.

What’s really interesting is that in order to fix it, Apple can either improve Safari or the font itself, and at the moment of writing, it wasn’t clear what was the right thing to do. (Oh, yeah. Fonts don’t just have bugs. Fonts have many kinds of bugs.)

Another interesting in-between-the-lines thing is that Apple’s emoji are perhaps the only survivor of the original skeuomorphic pre-iOS 7 era. Even today’s emoji party like 2008 never ended – still glossy, still textured, still bitmapped. I’m curious whether somewhere deep inside Apple, there exist exploratory designs for flat, vector versions of emoji that never saw the light of day.