Wouldn't the most obvious solution be to open-source FA fonts and include them in Linux, Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android? If they were installed on all systems then we wouldn't really have this issue at all. Given the ubiquity of some fonts this doesn't seem impossible.

Or and sorry to say cause I like FA, screw them and see if Apple/MS/Google can have an open standard icon font that doesn't suck.

They're available under the OFA license. They're already shipped with Linux, eg. here:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/package/rpms/fontaweso...

Yeah, and with the TTF available, readily installable on Windows/Mac OS as well. I used FA in a PPT just the other day.

Doesn't have to be in the OS. Enough to bundle it with the browsers. Same goes for all major frameworks as well, just ship jquery, angular, bootstrap and react with the browser already, like a super long lived cache.

If that's too steep for you, maybe a browser extension would be a good middle ground.