Why does Chrome on Windows 7 not show certain Unicode characters to me?

Solution 1:

I'm assuming it's a font substitution issue.

The browsers are encountering the problem of "The selected glyph is not in the specified font". There are two directions you can go from here: you can either pull the equivalent glyph out of another font (which will often look broken but it may not be clear why to the user) or just display a character-not-found placeholder (which will always look broken, but at least obviously so).

I imagine Firefox and Opera recognise that the glyph being requested is a symbol that is safe to pull from another font, while the remaining browsers are being conservative and just showing the "Uh... dunno" glyph.

Solution 2:

Interesting. It's not just Chrome -- you might well ask why any of the following browsers can't display it on Windows 7:

From top to bottom:

• Firefox (y)
• IE9 (n)
• Chrome (n)
• Opera (y)
• Safari (n)

Therefore, Firefox and Opera can display this unicode character in Windows 7, but the other browsers cannot.

what is this key? ⎋