Easter Eggs aren’t just the chocolate variety given to celebrate Easter. You can find Easter eggs on your computer in a variety of places. The Easter eggs in these instances are hidden messages or an inside joke within software.
There were a lot of Easter Eggs in the earlier releases of Microsoft software. These hidden programmes and messages caused a lot of concern for many companies and government offices (fear of confidential / sensitive data being compromised) and Microsoft now officially bans the practice of embedding Easter Eggs in their software as part of their Trustworthy Computing initiative.
Google has many Easter Eggs – type ‘answer to life the universe and everything’ into a Google search and the calculator will appear with the answer ’42’. This is from the book Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. A supercomputer is built to discover the answer to the ultimate question which turns out to be 42. Now we just need to know the question.
The following work in Google Chrome and some other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari:
Typing ‘askew’ will tilt your screen slightly
Typing ‘do a barrel roll’ will cause your screen to roll 360 degrees
Type ‘zerg rush’ and the Google O’s will destroy the search results
Type ‘about:mozilla’ in Firefox address bar for an strange extract from the Book of Mozilla and type ‘about:robots’ for a message from the robots.
See what else you can find, there are a lot of ‘tricks’ out there too – type google gravity and click the “I’m feeling lucky” link for a different experience.