Windows 11 introduced a completely new emoji set, replacing the simpler icons with more gradients and expressions. Microsoft is now updating a few of them to match the emoji more closely from other platforms.
Microsoft started rolling out Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 23466 to the Dev Channel for Insider testers this week. It includes updates to a few emoji, including ????️ Eye, ???? Folded Hands, ???? Alien, and ???? Pile of Poo. The blog post explains, “Everything from making the eye more recognizable to changing our alien to be out of this world. We know there are a few bugs in this release which will be resolved in future flights.”
The main goal seems to be matching the appearance of emoji on other platforms, which is definitely important — different appearances can lead to someone interpreting a message incorrectly. The eye emoji is now actually eye-shaped, like on nearly every other platform, instead of ball-shaped. Also, the poop emoji now looks more like a swirl, with larger eyes. I will miss the old one, though.
It sounds like Microsoft is also updating other emoji, but the company didn’t provide any more examples in the blog post. There’s also an update to the Emoji 15 standard in testing.
Source: Microsoft, @JenMsft
