Apple released iOS 8.3 recently. They added a lot more Emojis and all of them are rendered in mobile safari now. For Example ▶ will be rendered to an emoji icon. is there a way to disable emoji rendering? For example via CSS or JavaScript?
Yes you can disable these on a character by character basis by using the proper variant glyph.
The following example will render the black right pointing triangle as emoji as no variant is specified.
▶
However, if you specify the proper variant glyph you'll get the text.
▶︎
Generally speaking, ︎ gets you the text version and ️ or not otherwise specified gets you the emoji version.
See http://anthonyticknor.com/demos/emoji/ for an example in practice for the left arrow and the black heavy heart. I picked up most of what I did there from http://mts.io/2015/04/21/unicode-symbol-render-text-emoji/