Okay, emoji is hot now, but it is not when you cannot see it in desktop web browser. Especially there are tons of messages in twitter that use emoji. Now there is a solution to view emoji icons on desktop, but you have to use Firefox as web browser. Firefox is a advance web browser that is as least as good as internet explorer and safari, and it is cross platform that support Windows, MacOSX and Linux. You can download firefox here:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

After you installed firefox, you need to install an addon to convert your emoji text on webpage to icon. Previously there is nice guy in http://photar.net/emoji/ who wrote a script on grease monkey that allow you to show emoji on webpage.

Grease Monkey is a add-on on Firefox that allow you to execute JavaScript on every page you read. What this emoji script did is convert all emoji code to an image. Unfortunately, in this script, the emoji images are loaded from interface, and the JavaScript code is not quite optimized, that make Firefox quite slow after the script is installed.

Then another one in http://www.dunkelstern.de/pages/blog/ create a better add-on on Firefox. Firstly, it is now a real Firefox add-on and not just a Javascript. Moreover, emoji images are stored locally and the script are better optimized that I feel this solution is a lot better than the previous one.

To install this script:

1. Click on the attached file, its extension is xpi. It is a Firefox add-on. Since this script is not signed, Firefox will warn you, but it is okay on install it.
   
   

   Download emojireplacer.xpi and Firefox will warn you, Click "Allow"
2. After installation, you may need to restart Firefox.
   
   

   Click "Install Now" to install the add-on
   

   After the add-on is installed successfully, you have to restart Firefox. Click "Restart Firefox" to restart.
   

   Click "Restart" to confirm restart.
3. In Firefox menu, select Tools->Add-ons on confirm that the add-on is installed.
   
   

   Now can see the add-on is installed by select Tools->Add-ons in menu. You can also remove the add-on here later if you don't like it.
4. Now you can open a webpage, e.g. twitter.com, to see if you can view emoji
   
   

   Note that when you load a page, there will be a pink smily icon at the top right of the Firefox window, that means the add-on is working. It will dim and disappear when the conversion is finished.
   

   Now you can view emoji icon in Firefox!!!

Enter emoji on web
To enter emoji, you can visit http://www.dunkelstern.de/projects/emoji/ or http://photar.net/emoji/emojis.php. Select the icon and then copy and paste to your edit box.

Source: http://photar.net/emoji/
Source: http://www.dunkelstern.de/pages/blog/