Google Chrome without 3D

Yesterday you might have seen our blog post about "Google Chrome with 3D." You might have even downloaded our special version of Google Chrome and our printable 3D glasses. As someone of enormously high intelligence, you probably realized that this was our attempt at an April Fools' joke.

This elaborate scheme, conceived deep within the bowels of the Googleplex and executed at enormous expense, was to make a fake but believable 3D effect that could be toggled by a new button on the toolbar. The task fell on me to engineer.



The team was very supportive, urging me on with encouragement like, "We're doing an April Fools' joke?" and, "Why aren't you fixing crashes like you're supposed to?" I decided to do a simple shift of the red and blue channels of the image of the web page after it was rendered. This was easier than doing other suggestions like shifting only the images or creating a non-uniformly shifted image.

After spending nearly 30 minutes coding the effect, I conducted an extensive scientific test consisting of several coworkers standing behind my desk chair. The subjects wore authentic Hannah Montana 3D glasses and had prepared for the test with a diet of heavily caffeinated drinks provided by Google. The response was varied, ranging from "I don't get it," and "Wow, I have a headache!" to a resounding, "This is awesome. I feel sick."

The source code went through the standard publicly-visible code review process, ensuring high quality and consistent coding style, and was carefully obscured from prying eyes by the most boring but technically accurate change description possible. The feature's time is limited, however, and will eventually disappear.

In the end, we hope you enjoyed playing with our April Fools' joke as much as we enjoyed creating it. Thanks for using Google Chrome!

Posted by Brett Wilson, Software Engineer