Game does not render properly on most browsers

[epidemian]

The problem

The game used to look like this:

But for a while now, browsers have been URL-escaping whitespace characters on the URL, so the game started looking like this:

Totally unplayable :(

I tried to remedy this on 0858429, with some very hacky and questionable code that tries to pick some Unicode character to replace the empty Braille characters (U+2800) on the URL if they are being escaped.

This how it currently looks on my system on Firefox / Ubuntu:

Not great, but somewhat playable.

And on Chrome / Ubuntu it looks perfect:

But this is due to a quirk of how Chrome is rendering the U+0ADF Unicode character, and it's most likely a bug that will get fixed by the browser at some point (on Windows it doesn't look like that).

I don't have a Windows or MacOS system, but i've tried using BrowserStack to test the game on those systems, and the results are not pretty :(

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What could we do?

I don't know. It would be really nice to find some other way to make the game as playable as it used to be. Maybe finding another Unicode character that is less disruptive and works better in most systems (i've tried looking for similarly-sized and almost-blank characters over all the Unicode range already... so i don't have much hope there). Or trying out some other creative way of rendering the game on the address bar.

This issue is an open question. Any ideas are welcomed!