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Firefox 50's release notes:

Emoji for everyone! Firefox will use built-in Emoji on operating systems without native Emoji fonts (Windows 8.0 and lower and Linux)

So I'm on Windows 7 and I absolutely dislike colored emoji for how much distracting they are. There is no font file called "EmojiOne Mozilla" to delete from Windows' fonts folder, unfortunately. And there is no relevant option in about:config list I could find.

How do I disable colored emoticons?

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  • It's only a "test" release. Who knows what will change when it is properly released.
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Aug 9, 2016 at 11:30
  • bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231701#c135 "You could manually delete the font file in the Firefox directory."
    – Bob
    Oct 17, 2016 at 5:11
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    Thanks for asking this. I prefer my emoji in the same color as the other text around it.
    – mike3996
    Nov 21, 2016 at 17:28
  • I am guessing the OP asked this from the point of view of a user, but as an add-on developer, I find this disappointing that I can't programmatically disable emoji on my own page, or modify the behavior so that the font color is overridden by CSS rules. Instead, now I have to go muck in a TTF file with FontForge, extract the vector data as SVG, create my own icons and font file, delete all unused, and inject my custom font on every page with CSS. But to consistently support legacy browsers back to v29, I guess I'll need to do that anyways. Thanks for asking the question and the responses.
    – user587061
    Mar 3, 2017 at 13:58
  • @user314159 I tried writing a script that removes all symbols in the unicode emoji ranges (via greasemonkey) but that didn't work for some reason. You could try that approach and share your progress if it works out.
    – user1306322
    Mar 7, 2017 at 5:53

6 Answers 6

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It's not installed as a system font. The font file is contained within the Firefox directory, and deleting that one is sufficient. Note that you'll need to actually delete or move the file - simply renaming it, even changing the file extension, is not enough to prevent its use.

In the current Aurora build, the file you'll want to remove is <firefox>\fonts\EmojiOneMozilla.ttf, where <firefox> is the installation folder, which will vary depending on the bit-ness (Program Files or Program Files (x86)) and channel (Mozilla Firefox, Aurora or Nightly). On Windows you can right-click Firefox shortcut and select Open file location.

See also: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231701#c135

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  • I deleted EmojiOneMozilla.ttf, emojis aren't disabled.
    – user198350
    Dec 22, 2016 at 17:51
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    @user598527 This doesn't disable emoji characters. It just removes the new bundled coloured font so the browser falls back to the system font.
    – Bob
    Dec 22, 2016 at 21:46
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Go to about:config, context menu (right click) > new > string. Set font.name-list.serif.x-unicode as preference name and Segoe UI Symbol as string value.
Colored emojis are instantaneously disabled, no need to refresh open tabs or restart the browser.

Source

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    You can even create an empty font with all emoji ranges and set it to that!
    – user1306322
    Mar 8, 2017 at 12:06
  • @user1306322: Do you mean that emojis can be completely disabled? Feel free to edit my answer.
    – user198350
    Mar 8, 2017 at 15:10
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    I used a font editor and opened up the EmojiOneMozilla.ttf, found the symbol used for unmapped/unknown characters and pasted it into every character in the font. It's crude because some of those are used in composite emojis like overlaying eyes, noses, hair and whatever over the base face shape, but it still works, and now every emoji symbol is a square. You could use a zero-width space character also, if you don't like seeing squares take up text space, but I'm comfortable like this.
    – user1306322
    Mar 9, 2017 at 5:56
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This is what I ended up doing for myself: I took the EmojiOneMozilla.ttf font file from <Firefox installation folder>\browser\fonts\ and edited all its emoji symbols to contain the "not defined" symbol at the very end of the Unicode range.

Using FontForge editor, I copied it and pasted over all the emoji symbols (edit > select > glyphs worth outputting), and installed it as a system font, and gave it a unique name so it could be used in Firefox as a custom installed font (as described in the other answer here) and now every emoji symbol is a square.

You could use an empty space symbol instead if you want, but then you won't be able to see where an emoji is expected to be, and it might be a bit confusing.

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  • I also tried this with Fontforge (October 2016 release) on Windows. How long did it take for you to process? The program hanged and appeared to be frozen when attempting pasting my custom image over all fonts.
    – user198350
    May 21, 2017 at 18:43
  • Could you upload your EmojiOneMozilla.ttf to a file hosting service? :)
    – user198350
    May 21, 2017 at 18:48
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    @user598527 I'm sure I screwed up something in it, so I'd rather everyone make their own roughly following the instructions I described. And if the font file is gonna be updated, it's better if people modify the latest versions that they have on their computer. Especially if there are any OS-specific differences which I might not be aware about.
    – user1306322
    May 22, 2017 at 4:04
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Something broke with the method I've been using until today, so I looked up a new solution and this addon seems to be working: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-emoji/

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Removing the font file is one option. Found it here on Ubuntu Linux:

/usr/lib/firefox/fonts/EmojiOneMozilla.ttf
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  • @fixer1234 Sure it does, by removing the font that provides the coloured glyphs. This is effectively the Linux version of my answer. (While the question is tagged Windows, the quoted release notes mention Linux in the same sentence. I suppose this could be split into a separate question.)
    – Bob
    Jul 10, 2018 at 17:37
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Others have mentioned the "EmojiOneMozilla.ttf" file. There is a way however to disable the coloured images and fall back to the black and white versions of the characters, just by editing that file.

Simply open the file in a hex editor, and look for the string COLR, which should be located somewhere near the start of the file. All you need is to modify the sequence to something meaningless, like CXXX, and save. Now the coloured section of the font is effectively ignored by any application that uses it, so this "technique" can also be done to system fonts with coloured glyphs.

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