In reply to Aaron Jorbin.

This is what is so annoying in this feature, nowhere else that I can think of wordpress core tries to do things that browsers do not support, you should always aim to the lower common feature set of browsers or at least leave it to themes.. What happens with the shim when JS is disabled?

By the time the wordpress release was out chrome got proper support for emoji and it was not needed any more. now it is just a peace of junk code slowing down 25% of the internet for no real reason, and now that it is not needed there is no plan on when it will be removed.