Intuition is ?

Complaining about WordPress 4.2’s inline Emoji script is to complain about the biggest front end performance gain of the feature.

You see, that tiny script does two things:

• check if your visitors browser supports Emoji, and,
• asynchronously load the JavaScript to polyfill Emoji if the visitor’s browser requires it.

Asynchronously loaded JavaScript means that the browser does not slow down to load it, it loads your content whiles the script loads in the background.

I really care about performance, I consider the commit that switched to loading the script in the manner one of the most important commits in the feature.

When I enabled Emoji on my site, my PageSpeed went from 93 to 93, my time to render (according to WebPageTest) went from under one second to under one second. The emoji script has no affect on a site’s visitors.

Disabling WordPress’s emoji feature is possible via a plugin in the w.org repository. You should feel free to do so in the knowledge it will only affect your browser impaired visitors, as they attempt to ? or ? in the comments.