_Photo by Bernard Hermant on _Unsplash

I've had a problem where I was trying to display an Emoji in a Chrome Extension header of default popup HTML, page_action.html (specified by page_action -> default_popup in manifest.json).

But got the jumbled up characters instead.

Emoji displayed as gobbledygook

The problem was that I had to instruct Chrome that I am using a unicode by adding a charset meta tag.

https://gist.github.com/dance2die/ab0741ac11b3116d0020075d7d87c8bc

Character Set set to UTF-8

This has fixed the issue and shows the cute 🐥 emoji correctly in the Chrome Extension popup.

You can now see the cute baby chick 🐥