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Firefox & Gtk Emoji picker
(mastransky.wordpress.com)
Holy mother of hacky solutions!
In which situation does it make sense for Firefox to call for it instead of you yourself? This seems like bloatware to me.
What would it mean for you to call it yourself? This change is just so that if you press Ctrl+. in Firefox, the native emoji picker shows up, so at least in that sense you're invoking it yourself? (Before this change, Ctrl+. would do nothing in Firefox, even though it would show the emoji picker in normal GTK applications.)
The thing is that I can already do Super+. (or was it ,, can't remember now) and I get shown my emoji picker (which is not the GTK one, but the KDE one) for ANY app that I am using. No need for Firefox to help me on that.
So the situation in which this makes sense is when you're using Gnome.
Not even that, because Gnome probably already has a shortcut for the emoji picker.
Yes, but that didn't work in Firefox before this change. The whole point of this change is to make that work in Firefox as well. (Likewise, it still doesn't work in Chrome, Chrome-based browsers, and Electron apps.)
How could Firefox or Chrome block a system shortcut??
It's not so much that they're blocking it, as it is that they're not implementing it. In GNOME, as I understand it, the Emoji picker is implemented by the toolkit (GTK). That means that apps that don't (fully) use that toolkit, such as Chrome and Firefox, will need to add the implementation themselves. That is now done for Firefox.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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