EmojiOne Color font doesn't replace black and white emoji font in Firefox or Chrome

Just yesterday, I installed the EmojiOne Color SVGinOT Font (fonts-emojione-svginot) for Ubuntu via the Launchpad PPA method. On the emoji demo page, all the emoji display in color on my laptop.

But emoji like 😂 (tears of joy) show up as their black and white counterparts rather than their EmojiOne counterparts in Firefox. On Chrome, all emoji show up as black and white icons.

Firefox:

Chrome (demo page):

Why is it that Firefox will display some emojis in colour, but other emojis in black and white? In Unity Tweak Tool, my default font is set to Bitstream Vera Sans Roman (I have no other types of Bitstream Vera fonts), which is said to display EmojiOne. My document and window font is set to the same one. Only my monospace font is different (Courier). In Firefox's about:config, I have "gfx.font_rendering.fontconfig.fontlist.enabled" set to "false". Also, my Serif and Sans-serif fonts are both set to Bitstream Vera in Firefox.

I've also noticed that sometimes my fonts will switch to DejaVu Sans. Why? Why can't I set my fonts to a Bitstream font permanently?

I just tackled this on my machine (running 16.04). I don't like that I had to do this since Firefox 50 suppose to have native emoji support for operating systems that do not have them.

1. Download the latest version do you desired location (I did to my Downloads folder) https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font/releases/download/v1.3/EmojiOneColor-SVGinOT-Linux-1.3.tar.gz
2. Uncompress the file (I use build in zip archiver/unarchiver
3. Run the install.sh file found once you extract the EmojiOneColor with root privileges via terminal (sudo ./install.sh)

Then test with http://eosrei.github.io/emojione-color-font/full-demo.html

The other answer suggests to use EmojiOne, but it has reached its end of life in March 2018. Now rather have a look at its successor: the Twitter Emoji font by the same GitHub user. There are also user repositories (called PPA in Ubuntu) provided for Ubuntu, Arch and Gentoo. Using these instead of a manual install will update the font with your regular updates.

To install the font in Ubuntu I followed their instructions:

• Add the PPA with sudo apt-add-repository ppa:eosrei/fonts
• Update the package index with sudo apt update (should be done automatically when adding the repository)
• Install TwitterEmoji font with sudo apt install fonts-twemoji-svginot

Afterwards you have to restart Thunderbird / Firefox to show the emojis in color. 😀