Aw, Snap! Chrome tab crashes.

I think Google Chrome is a great browser, but even great browsers sometimes fail. In fact, I just had two tabs crash on me. They happened to both be Google Docs tabs so Google can’t pin the blame on anyone else. However, instead of just sitting there dumbly, Chrome informed me that the tabs weren’t responding and gave me the option to close them. This is part of Google’s whole strategy for Chrome. The renderer for every tab is a separate process, so that if something goes wrong, they can be killed individually rather than crashing the whole browser.

While being able to kill the tabs was nice, it’s not what I’m writing about. What I’m writing about is Chrome’s brilliant strategy of, when it fails, being too cute for you to be mad at it. It’s a master stroke. Software that exploits people’s emotions to get people to like it even when it misbehaves! Software has finally evolved to the level of a two year old. The image above is a screenshot of the page Chrome showed me after I chose to kill the tabs. How can you be mad when looking into those poor pixel-art eyes?