Glyphicons showing up as Emoji in Safari

With the latest version of Safari 9 (iOS 9.1), I encountered a problem with Glyphicons (with bootstrap 3.3.5) showing up as Emoji.

It only happens intermittently when offline using an appcache.

Meanwhile, I also had Font Awesome Icons on the same page which were working fine.

I found a few Stack Overflow posts
How to prevent Unicode characters from rendering as emoji in HTML from JavaScript?
How to prevent Bootstrap's glyphicon rendering to emoji (Opera, FF)?

and a closed bootstrap bug
Bootstrap v3.1.1: Wrong glyphicons on iPad 

But none of them had any solution which worked, but then doing some further research, I then discovered that Bootstrap v4 is dropping Glyphicons

So, the solution I'm using is to get ready for Bootstrap v4 and just dump Glyphicons entirely

UPDATE: Turns out it was a PBKAC, I didn't have a .woff entry in the appache manifest, as glorious IE6 (Safari) doesn't support woff2 yet

BROKEN: Web apps launched from the iOS home screen always reload

Sadly mobile Safari has a sordid history of being broken in each new release, but mobile web apps have been broken for a very long time (since circa 2010).

It appears that if you save a web page using a manifest to the homepage, it doesn't really work. Each time you click the icon from the homepage or switch back to the application, the damn webpage is reloaded, which is fine for a simple webpage, but we are talking about Web Apps.

It would appear that at blame is iOS and it's faux multitasking.

There is a lot of stuff over on Stackover flow about this, i.e. Stop reloading of web app launched from iPhone Home Screen . Alas, no solutions but advice to persist your application state in localstorage (or you could risk indexeddb which is another sad Safari story) but that doesn't solve the underlying problem.

Meanwhile, Chrome on Android just works a treat, Web Apps don't reload when you switch or launch them.

My main frustration with Web Apps via Chrome on Android is that the Fullscreen API doesn't allow you to expose the browser chrome and thus settings from full screen mode.

This means it's even more complicated for users wanting to re-enable navigator.geolocation support after ignoring or denying the first and only prompt. Try walking your parents thru that over the phone...

Please prove me wrong or tell me the next iOS release addresses this issue?

Mozilla Developer Network beats w3schools for HTML help

One of the terrible legacies of the modern web is that most search queries on Google relating to html / web technologies often have terrible results, usually involving w3schools, which has patchy, inaccurate and out of date content.

It makes me heart heavy and sad to see StackOverflow answers based on W3Schools’ inaccuracies, and riven entirely when they’re accepted.

— Eric A. Meyer (@meyerweb) June 4, 2012

Now if Google was nice, they would simply demote the shitty w3schools content, but there is an easy workaround, you can simply add MDN to your search and get results from the wonderful Mozilla Developer Network.