Microsoft decided to make its Fluent-style emojis available on Windows 11 this week. A new optional update for the operating system is about to be released now, including a number of major bugfixes and the new emoji that Microsoft introduced earlier this year. While it’s an entirely new style, it’s not the 3D look Microsoft promised earlier, the company opted for 2D.
New emojis in Windows 11 include the return of Clippy, as Microsoft replaced the standard paperclip emoji with its Clippy character. The emoji has also been redesigned to include bright, saturated colors, but it lacks the 3D aspects that make them stand out.
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“The new style of emoji is only available in Windows 11 and is 2D,” explains Microsoft. “We still offer a variety of emojis [sic] for Windows 10 customers.” This same blog post further points out that Microsoft “opted 3D designs over 2D and chose to animate most of our emojis”.
It’s not clear whether we’ll ever see the stunning 3D emoji inside Windows 11 that Microsoft demonstrated earlier this year. The lack of 3D may be related to technical limitations of the Microsoft color font format the company uses to display emoji within Windows. While Apple uses bitmaps to render its emoji, Microsoft uses a vector format which is much more scalable and has file size benefits if the emoji are flatter.
