MacOS – Unicode character U+273F rendered as a cherry blossom in browser but not in applications

OS X normally will not display a character in the Private Use Area unless you manually set the font in the app. I understand this is intentional, since every font could have a different glyph at the same PUA code point, and it only makes sense to display something when the user specifies the font.

I think it should also work when the right font is selected via CSS or other markup in a document being read.

Some earlier versions of OS X did not have this "feature" and did display PUA stuff. I don't know how they chose which font to use when more than one had something at the code point selected.

Ctrl+Option+Space in 10.9.x brings up a quick access to special characters in line where you're typing —throughout most every app.

The search algorithm is the same of course, which it seems relies on how the charicter is tagged rather than a smart search throughout.

Still, in general, I have found the quick access shortcut and search to work well for most things. If you start typing while the special char fly out is open it will run a search.

Interestingly, While it seems that some older special characters like π have names that need to be entered exactly to search for them "small greek letter pi = π", emoji will display if just part of the name is searched. "Person with blond hair=?" can be searched just by typing in blond.