In reply to Aaron Jorbin.

You are asking for stats as if avoidable needless waste is acceptable if it is not too bad.

The code itself is idiotic because it assumes that browsers will always use a specific filler that can be detected because we know there are no other browsers in the world and there will never be and those that exist will never change their error behavior. That code is a very stupid way to do browser feature detection.

why only emoji, why not to add similar code so that people that don't have hebrew fonts installed on their cpmputer will not get some weird characters when reading my hebrew blog? There are probably more people that post in hebrew then people that post with emojis.

Now lets get to how it makes the internet slower 1. Obviously the JS has to be executed on each page load and the detection is done using canvas which is an expensive operation. For a wordpress site with 40M pageviews a month a delay of 1ms means a waste of 1000 seconds a day, about 16 minute. Now that site is just about 4k in alexa so multiply by whatever factor you like, and we talk only about daily waste of time.

2. The less obvious way is by making html size bigger which means that the zipping of each page takes longer and makes the server work harder and be less responsive, and then if you are unlukcy it will mean that you will need additional TCP packet to deliver the HTML and in addition to making the page slower you create more network congestion.

This kind of stupid things is expected from plugin and theme authors, it is a shocking surprise when it comes from core. After all, the core development moto is "decisions, not options", but in order to be able to say it in a straight face the decisions has to be perfect and this one was light years from perfect.

With 20k active users for this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-emojis/ how can core developers says that they actually communicate with the community when the community is voting against that feature but it doesn't seem like anyone in core cares about the feedback. Maybe someone should nominate it to be a featured plugin for 4.5