On my Firefox it looks like four "a"s, with a sort of tower over the first "a" that ends in a frowny face with an accent over it. Is this[1] what you're seeing and describing differently? Or are we having different things displayed by Firefox?

[1] https://i.postimg.cc/nVPBqXjV/fireunicode.png

On my computer I see three different representations: In the text on Hacker News, I see the stuff on top of the first "a", in the tab title, it is on top of the second "a", and in the window title, it doesn't render the SSID string (although the rest of the title is displayed).

Same, I actually assumed that's what the string was supposed to be, now opening this in chrome I can see wildly different it looks

This[1] is how it looks to me on my Firefox, is that the Chrome version or the Firefox version on your side?

[1] https://i.postimg.cc/nVPBqXjV/fireunicode.png

Oh weird, are you on windows? I'm on mac and I see all the diacritics squished down into a small pile in firefox

I actually thought there was a squashed bug on my screen.