In reply to Peter Knight.

Emoji had replaced the old ugly smilies, so in a way there was one feature in and one out. The problem with emoji is that the core team didn't wait until chrome had a "native" support for them which made the JS code a requirement. Now that chrome has support for it I guess it will be hard to remove that JS out of pure inertia (and people will cry that emoji stopped working in IE8 if you remove it now).