Wingdings font family does not seem to work on Firefox and Opera

Question

I was using the Wingdings font in the CSS for some symbols like a pencil and a home icon.

It worked on IE, Chrome and Safari but not in Firefox and Opera. I googled

Answer 1

To quote a website:

There was an endless debate between the people that said Mozilla should support the symbol font in its default configuration because that is a valuable ability and standards lawyers who said no, because they believe that support violates the HTML standard. So far, the obstructionists have prevailed.

http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/Wfonts.html