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People are still using Windows 7 -- it's the third most popular Windows version after 10 and 11 -- and it only supports Unicode 5.1.

Emoji weren't officially supported until Unicode 6.0, though there are a subset of current emoji (less than a quarter) that work on Windows 7 in practice.

Meanwhile the current standard is 15.1.

There's no security or convenience necessity whatsoever for supporting emoji in passwords, but inconsistent OS support is an excellent reason against it.



Windows 7 market share is barely at 3% on the internet per statcounter.com. Third place doesn't mean "popular", especially not right now.

There's quite a bit of convenience, and some concomitant security, to using emoji in passwords. Emoji are high entropy code points that are easily visually distinguishable across most language boundaries. A "short" password of just emoji is going to have way higher entropy and be way harder to brute-force/rainbow table than any equivalent "length" (by visual character count) ASCII-only password. That should go without saying. The fact that huge boost in entropy also comes with a massive benefit in how quickly a user can glance at their password and know that they typed in right/wrong often faster than they could if forced to build a line-noise password is a huge bonus. (Related to why Windows 10 experimented with Picture Passwords and a lot of Android users use some form or another of Gesture PINs.)

That said, I think the real solution is of course to eliminate passwords altogether (and yes Passkeys are our best hope right now). But saying that we have to stick to ASCII for passwords because that's a lowest common denominator for keyboards is very much like saying that we should stick only to passwords that you can T-9 on flip phones or send in an SMS or that passwords shouldn't really be longer than 8 characters just in case some Unix system needs to use the old DES-based crypt() function or that passwords shouldn't contain quote marks, semicolons, or percentage signs because those might be SQL injection attacks and you might have some PHP apps that are vulnerable to those. You are letting silly technical lowest common denominator bugs stop you from increasing security for the median/mean user.


3% of the internet is still an incredibly large amount of people.


Sure? But what definition of "popular" does "large amount of people" meet? "Of or relating to the general public"? The general public is using Windows 10 and 11. "Suitable to the majority"? Again, the vast majority is 10 and 11. Same for "frequently encountered or accepted" and "commonly liked or approved": the most frequently encountered is Windows 10. So too is the most "commonly liked". 3% is still 3% and far and away a minority and definitely not in any way "popular", by any definition I can find.


It seems like a very good idea to not allow passwords that can't be input on 3% of commonly used Windows computers. 3% is still a very significant number when it comes to compatibility, customer support, etc.




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