For all this time, the address bar of web browsers allow people to enter letters or numbers, or combination of both.
This way, they can browse the wilderness of the web, the network of networks that keep on growing as the internet expands to more places around the world. Opera is a popular web browser, and it wants to reinvent the address bar using emojis, instead of just the plain old school text method.
To do this, the browser made a partnership with Yat.
With the partnership, users of Opera on both mobile and desktop can type in a string of emoji symbols into the address bar, and in return, the browser will load up the associated website - assuming the emoji-based address is registered and valid.
This is possible because Yat is a Tennessee-based provider of emoji-based web addresses.
According to Jørgen Arnesen, executive vice president of mobile at Opera, in a press release:
With the Yat integration, Opera said in a blog post that its browser is the first to enable emoji-only based web addresses.
All users have to do, is type in y.at/ before the emoji string.
To call the emoji-based function, the requirement to type in the prefix is the only limitation.
However, Yat has worked with Opera to solve the restriction by integrating the emoji-address reading function directly into the browser.
"Opera users can simply insert ?? into their mobile and desktop browsers to get to Lil Wayne's record label," Opera said. "Furthermore, emojis embedded on web pages now link to the corresponding Yat page automatically."
"Embracing of emojis as a form of expression is a further step in Opera’s commitment to being at the forefront of innovation,” the browser maker added.
At this time, severable notable celebrities - mostly musicians - have already purchased Yats for website hosting or promotions.
Besides Lil Wayne, others include Kesha, Steve Aoki, and more.
This feature should be a welcome addition to Opera, especially to user on mobile devices, since it's much easier to enter emojis than it is to type long web addresses.
What's more, emojis can make web addresses look cooler, at least according to Opera.
But whether or not the feature is useful for most people, should depend on how well they are into emojis. This is because it's a lot easier to remember text-based web addresses, and that it is more difficult to remember a combination of seemingly unrelated symbols, especially since there are thousands of emojis out there.
It's worth noting that owners of Yats can tokenize them as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.
The company plans on letting users connect their Yats to electronic payments.
Yats that are between one and five characters and can sell from anywhere between a few dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The most expensive Yat to date, was a single-character gold key that went on sale for $425,000 in 2021.