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Microsoft is making its Fluent-style emoji available in Windows 11 this week. A new optional update for the OS is rolling out that includes a number of important bug fixes and the new emoji Microsoft previewed earlier this year. While it’s a totally new style, the company opted for 2D instead of 3D as promised by the company earlier.
The new emoji in Windows 11 includes the return of Clippy, as Microsoft has replaced the standard paperclip emoji with its Clippy character. The emoji have also been redesigned to include bright and saturated colours.
“The new emoji style is only available in Windows 11 and is 2D,” explains Microsoft in a recent updated blog.
The lack of 3D could be related to technical limitations of Microsoft’s color font format that the company uses to display emoji inside Windows. While Apple uses bitmaps to render its emoji, Microsoft uses a vector format which is far more scalable and has file size benefits if emoji are flatter.
The users are expecting 3D and animated versions of these Fluent emoji to appear in products like Microsoft Teams. Microsoft has made it clear that it doesn’t plan on bringing this new emoji to Windows 10.
Microsoft has also been working on designing its own Arm-based processors for servers and possibly future Surface devices. The software giant started work on these new chips more than a year ago, and reports suggest they’ll be used primarily in servers for Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.
Microsoft currently uses Intel-based processors for the majority of its Azure cloud services, and most of the company’s Surface line up runs on Intel chips. Microsoft did break from tradition to work with AMD and Qualcomm for custom chips for its Surface Laptop 3 and Surface Pro X devices.