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Emoji domains now easier to use

Kevin Murphy, September 25, 2018, 17:42:33 (UTC), Domain Tech

Emoji domains have become marginally easier to navigate to in the last month, following an update to Google’s Chrome browser.
Google has added “Emoji” to the context menu that appears when users right-click in any editable text field — including the address/search bar.
Clicking the option brings up a searchable list of common emojis that can be inserted into the address bar for either search or, with the addition of a typed-in TLD, navigation.
TLDs currently supporting emojis include .ws, .fm and .to. ICANN has ruled out support for emojis in the gTLDs for security reasons.
When the domain is resolved, the emojis render in the address bar as Punycode-converted Latin characters beginning with the usual “xn--” prefix, at least under my default configuration.
The whole process is still a bit fiddly, so I wouldn’t all rush out to build your businesses on emoji domains just yet.
The context menu feature appears to have been on the experimental track in Chrome for at least a month, but was more recently turned on by default, at least on all the Chrome 69 installs I’ve tested.
If you don’t get the emoji option in your context menu, you should be able to turn it on by navigating to chrome://flags/#enable-emoji-context-menu and selecting the Enabled option.

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Comments (2)

  1. Darryl Lopes says:

    Great to hear! Need one social influencer to give emojis domain some social proof and it will catch fire.

  2. page howe says:

    it does seem the key is to type in the emoji part of the domain name, then remove the box and you can type in the tld, i use .ws exclusively, and then it does resolve straight away as opposed to just showing you the puny code to click.
    the trend is still my friend on emojis in the direction of adaptation among social media systems, operating systems, browsers and apps.
    thank for the find
    page

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