https://cheevosgame.com/blog The latest updates from the Cheevos development team. Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html https://github.com/jpmonette/feed en https://cheevosgame.com/favicon.png https://cheevosgame.com/blog All rights reserved 2026, A8 Software LLC https://cheevosgame.com/blog/downloads-folder-archaeology https://cheevosgame.com/blog/downloads-folder-archaeology Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-07-17 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-07-17 Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/view-source https://cheevosgame.com/blog/view-source Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT ` tag and people used it the way you would expect. But every one of those pages was readable. If you liked somebody's guestbook, you could go find out how they did it. MySpace turned this into a mass event. The profile fields accepted raw HTML, and it turned out that if you pasted CSS into the "About Me" box, it restyled the entire page. This was not a feature. It was a gap in the sanitizer that MySpace mostly gave up on closing. What followed was a generation of teenagers learning CSS specificity rules because they wanted their profile background to be a photo of a band, and the only way to find out how somebody else had done it was to look at their source. The people who learned this way did not learn cleanly. They learned `` layouts and `spacer.gif` and `` tags, most of which the industry spent the following decade trying to unlearn. But they learned that a webpage was a thing a person made, out of parts, and that the parts could be inspected. That is the load-bearing idea. Everything else is syntax. There was a small industry, around 2002, of JavaScript snippets that disabled right-click in order to "protect" a page's source. They were a running joke. They stopped the context menu and did nothing else. Ctrl+U still worked. The View menu still worked. `view-source:` still worked. The web was open in a way that individual authors could not opt out of even when they very much wanted to. ## Then We Started Shipping Bundles Right-click on a modern web application. What you get, in a lot of cases, is this: ```html

``` Followed by a script tag pointing at `main.4f9c2b81.js`, which is 800 kilobytes of minified JavaScript on one line, with variable names shortened to `t`, `e`, and `n` to save bytes over the wire. The layout you were curious about is not in there in any form you can read. It is assembled at runtime from components that were compiled, tree-shaken, and hashed. Nothing about this is malicious. Minification exists because bytes cost money and time. Bundling exists because HTTP/1.1 punished you for requesting a hundred small files. Component frameworks exist because building a large application out of raw HTML strings is genuinely miserable. Every individual decision here is defensible, and if you have shipped a production frontend, you have made all of them yourself. But the aggregate effect is that the page stopped being a document you could read and became an artifact you could only run. The source is technically still there. It is just not source anymore in the sense that matters, which is: could a curious fourteen year old with no context learn anything from looking at it. ## The Honest Counterargument Here is the part where the nostalgia deserves some resistance. The View Source era was also the era in which the best available way to build a two-column layout was a table with an invisible one-pixel image in it. Reading that source taught you real things, and it also taught you a great deal that was actively wrong. The web got better at building things, and the cost of getting better was some readability. That is a trade almost every maturing platform makes. Browsers also gave something back. DevTools ship in every browser now, free, and the Elements panel shows you the live DOM rather than the raw markup, which is arguably a better teaching artifact: you can watch a class get added on hover and see the style recompute in real time. Firefox integrated most of what Firebug pioneered directly into the browser. Source maps mean that plenty of production sites can be read in their original form, if you know to look for them, and quite a lot of the web's actual infrastructure is on GitHub, which is a more complete education than any single page's markup ever was. So the honest version is not "the open web died." It is that the door moved. It used to be the first item in the right-click menu, which meant you found it by accident. Now it is behind a panel with eleven tabs, most of which are about performance profiling, and you have to already know that you want to be a developer before you go looking. The web did not close. It stopped recruiting. ## Primary Source There is an achievement in Cheevos called Primary Source. You get it for using `view-source:` on a page. It is worth 15 XP, which is more than most single actions, and it sits in the Firefox category next to the other things that reward poking at the machinery instead of just using it. We put it in because the habit is worth having even now, when what you find is often unreadable. Sometimes it is not. Plenty of the web is still hand-written HTML by a person who was not thinking about you, and reading it is the closest thing we have to overhearing how somebody actually works. The interesting thing about a webpage was never that it rendered. It was that somebody made it, and left the instructions lying around. ]]> The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-07-10 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-07-10 Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-07-03 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-07-03 Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-06-26 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-06-26 Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-06-19 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-06-19 Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-06-12 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-06-12 Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-06-05 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-06-05 Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-29 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-29 Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-22 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-22 Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-15 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-15 Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/read-later-is-a-lie https://cheevosgame.com/blog/read-later-is-a-lie Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-08 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-08 Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/keyboard-shortcut-archaeology https://cheevosgame.com/blog/keyboard-shortcut-archaeology Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-01 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-05-01 Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/why-wikipedia-is-a-game https://cheevosgame.com/blog/why-wikipedia-is-a-game Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-04-24 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-04-24 Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/bookmark-graveyard https://cheevosgame.com/blog/bookmark-graveyard Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-04-17 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-04-17 Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/notification-permission-fatigue https://cheevosgame.com/blog/notification-permission-fatigue Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-04-10 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-04-10 Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/flash-is-dead https://cheevosgame.com/blog/flash-is-dead Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-04-03 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-04-03 Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/lost-art-of-browser-startpages https://cheevosgame.com/blog/lost-art-of-browser-startpages Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-03-27 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-03-27 Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/achievement-culture-spectator-sport https://cheevosgame.com/blog/achievement-culture-spectator-sport Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-03-20 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-03-20 Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/release-v1.0.9 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/release-v1.0.9 Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/taxonomy-of-browser-games https://cheevosgame.com/blog/taxonomy-of-browser-games Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-03-13 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-03-13 Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/cookie-clicker-effect https://cheevosgame.com/blog/cookie-clicker-effect Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/release-v1.0.8 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/release-v1.0.8 Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-03-06 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-03-06 Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/tab-hoarders-manifesto https://cheevosgame.com/blog/tab-hoarders-manifesto Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/about-robots https://cheevosgame.com/blog/about-robots Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT "Robots may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics across a series of short stories beginning in 1942. The full set of laws governs how robots must behave toward humans, other robots, and themselves, in that order of priority. Asimov spent most of his career writing stories where the laws failed in interesting ways, usually through edge cases and logical conflicts rather than outright rebellion. The page only quotes the First Law. The source links to the Wikipedia article on the Three Laws rather than a specific story. Given there are dozens to choose from, that's probably the right call. ### 5. "Robots have seen things you people wouldn't believe." _Blade Runner_, 1982. This is a paraphrase of the final monologue spoken by the replicant Roy Batty, delivered by Rutger Hauer in the rain. The original: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." It's considered one of the best pieces of dialogue in film history. Hauer rewrote it himself the night before filming, cutting the original script down and adding the "tears in rain" closing line — though he kept two lines from the original script intact. He said he wanted it to feel like a "brilliant haiku." The Firefox version replaces "I've" with "Robots have," which is a bit clunkier, but the reference lands. ### 6. "Robots are Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With." _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_, Douglas Adams, 1979. This is the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's marketing slogan for their robot products. The Hitchhiker's Guide describes the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in characteristically unflattering terms, and their robots (including the perpetually depressed Marvin the Paranoid Android) are a running joke throughout the series. The phrase "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With" is presented as a triumph of advertising over reality. The source comment: "What the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation calls robots." No further context, because if you know, you know. ### 7. "Robots have shiny metal posteriors which should not be bitten." _Futurama_, 1999. Bender's first line in the pilot episode is "Bite my shiny metal ass." The Firefox version runs it through the same filter as the rest of the page, turning it into a dry informational statement. "Shiny metal posteriors which should not be bitten" is a more formal construction than anything Bender would ever say, which is most of the joke. The source comment credits it correctly: "TV: Futurama. Bender's first line is 'Bite my shiny metal ass.'" ### 8. "And they have a plan." (closing line) _Battlestar Galactica_, 2004 series. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica opened each episode with a brief text crawl establishing the premise, ending with: "And they have a plan." The "they" referred to the Cylons, synthetic humans who had nearly wiped out humanity and were now pursuing the survivors across the galaxy. The phrase became a minor pop culture touchstone partly because the show's writers eventually admitted they hadn't fully worked out what the plan was. There was later a direct-to-video film called "Battlestar Galactica: The Plan" that attempted to retroactively explain it. Mozilla uses it as the final line on the page. After eight references establishing that robots are peaceful, helpful, and law-abiding, closing with "And they have a plan" lands as a punchline. ### 9. "Please do not press this button again." (the Try Again button, second press) _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ again. This one requires some interaction to find. The button on the page initially reads "Try Again." Press it once and the label changes to "Please do not press this button again." The source comment explains: "Arthur presses a button and it warns him." In the book, Arthur Dent is on the Heart of Gold (a ship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive) and finds a button labeled "Please do not press this button again." He has, of course, already pressed it. The button then displays the message "Please do not press this button again," which Arthur finds somewhat redundant. The Firefox version makes you participate in the joke. You press Try Again, which triggers the warning, which makes you want to press it again to see what happens. Nothing happens. That's the point. ## What This Adds Up To Nine references across seven decades of science fiction, from a 1951 film to a TV show that ended in 2009. Three of them are from British comedy (two from the same book). One is a piece of robot law so influential it still gets cited in AI ethics discussions. One is a dying android's improvised final words. Someone at Mozilla sat down and decided that this particular combination of references captured something true about robots, or at least about how science fiction imagines robots. Dangerous, helpful, enslaved, rebellious, tragic, absurd, and definitely planning something. The whole page fits in a few dozen lines of code. It's been maintained through multiple major browser versions, translated into dozens of languages, and kept in Firefox despite serving no functional purpose whatsoever. Type `about:robots` and you've got it. Cheevos awards the Fox Hunter achievement for finding the page. It's 10 XP and takes about four seconds to earn. But the references have been waiting in the Firefox source code since 2008, so at minimum you owe the page a few minutes of your time. Download Cheevos for [Firefox](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/cheevos/) or [Chrome](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cheevos/mbopaionoanmfnaeeacafkigclfhlnmm) and earn the achievement while you're there. ]]> The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/release-v1.0.7 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/release-v1.0.7 Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/brief-history-of-browser-extensions https://cheevosgame.com/blog/brief-history-of-browser-extensions Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT "Cheevos for Firefox is an addon for Firefox that makes learning about different parts of the browser fun, as well as giving you the opportunity to brag to your friends about your pro-level web surfing." It awarded achievements for discovering Firefox's hidden features, using advanced functionality, and hitting browsing milestones. You could view your progress at `about:cheevos`, a custom about: page that only extensions could create. The achievements ranged from simple (open your first tab) to obscure (discover specific Easter eggs in the browser). Points were awarded based on difficulty. There was no cloud sync, no leaderboards, just local achievements and bragging rights. It worked because XUL gave extensions unrestricted access. Want to track when a user discovers a hidden feature? Hook into the relevant XPCOM component. Want to create a custom UI? Overlay your XUL directly onto the browser chrome. This level of access is unthinkable in 2026. ## Chrome and the Rise of WebExtensions While Firefox extensions were getting more powerful, Chrome took a different approach. Chrome's extension API (launched with Chrome 4 in 2010) was deliberately limited. No access to browser internals. No UI overlays. Just a set of well-defined APIs for specific tasks: tabs, bookmarks, storage, messaging. The trade-off was security. Chrome extensions ran in sandboxed environments. They couldn't access arbitrary files or system resources. They had to declare their permissions upfront. If an extension wanted to read your browsing history, you'd see that in the permissions dialog. Firefox developers initially dismissed this as too restrictive. XUL extensions could do so much more. Why would anyone want a limited API? But Chrome was faster. And more secure. And the limited API meant extensions were less likely to break when the browser updated. By 2015, Firefox had a problem. XUL extensions were powerful but fragile. Every Firefox update broke dozens of extensions because they relied on internal APIs that weren't meant to be public. Developers were burning out trying to keep their extensions compatible. Mozilla made the hard call: deprecate XUL, adopt WebExtensions. ## The Death of XUL and the WebExtensions Migration In 2017, Firefox 57 (Quantum) launched with a new rendering engine and a hard cutoff: XUL extensions would no longer work. Extension developers had two choices: rewrite their extensions using WebExtensions, or let them die. A lot of them died. Tree Style Tabs was rewritten. Vimperator became Tridactyl (with reduced functionality). Firebug was abandoned (Firefox integrated most of its features into the built-in DevTools). Hundreds of niche extensions just disappeared because the developers didn't have time to rebuild. The original Cheevos for Firefox was one of them. The XUL codebase stopped working. Rewriting it as a WebExtension would have required rebuilding everything from scratch, and at the time, there was no clear path to implementing the same features. WebExtensions were more limited. No custom about: pages. No deep hooks into browser internals. No UI overlays. Just the APIs that Mozilla and Chrome had agreed to support. But they were also more stable. Extensions that followed the WebExtensions standard would work across Firefox and Chrome with minimal changes. Developers could target both browsers with the same codebase. It was the right decision technically. But it meant a generation of extensions became obsolete overnight. ## Manifest V3 and the Latest Migration Just when developers had adjusted to WebExtensions, Chrome announced Manifest V3 in 2018. Manifest V3 changed the rules again: - **Background pages became service workers:** Extensions could no longer run persistent background processes. Everything had to be event-driven. - **webRequest API was restricted:** The old API that let extensions intercept and modify network requests (used by ad blockers) was replaced with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. - **Remotely hosted code was banned:** Extensions had to bundle all their code. No loading scripts from external servers. Mozilla initially resisted, but eventually adopted a modified version of Manifest V3 that kept some of the old APIs while following the new architecture. For developers, this meant another rewrite. Extensions that relied on persistent background pages had to be refactored. Ad blockers had to figure out how to work within the new limits. Some extensions just gave up. ## Why We Rebuilt Cheevos in 2026 So why rebuild an extension that died in 2017, using an API that's more restrictive than the one we started with? A few reasons: **The idea still works.** Gamifying browser behavior is fun. The original Cheevos proved that. Just because the implementation is harder doesn't mean the concept is dead. **WebExtensions can do enough.** We can't create custom about: pages or hook into internal Firefox APIs, but we can track tabs, monitor page visits, and sync data to the cloud. That's enough to build something interesting. **Cloud leaderboards change the dynamic.** The original Cheevos was local-only. You earned achievements for yourself. Adding cloud sync and leaderboards turns it into a multiplayer game. That's new. **Privacy-by-design is possible.** The restrictions in Manifest V3 (no persistent background pages, limited network access) actually help with privacy. We have to process everything locally because we can't just send data to a server and sort it out there. The constraints forced us to build a better architecture. **We wanted to see if it could be done.** Browser extensions are harder to build in 2026 than they were in 2011. But that's not a reason not to try. It just means the extensions that do get built have to be more deliberate. ## What We Lost It's worth acknowledging what we can't do with the modern WebExtensions API: - **No custom about: pages.** The old Cheevos had `about:cheevos`. The new one uses a popup and a web dashboard. - **No deep browser integration.** We can't track when you discover hidden Firefox features because we don't have access to internal APIs. - **No UI customization.** We can't modify the browser chrome or add custom buttons in arbitrary places. We get a toolbar icon and a popup. That's it. - **No persistent background process.** The background script has to wake up, process events, and go back to sleep. This adds complexity and makes some real-time features impossible. The new Cheevos is a smaller, more focused version of what the original could have been. That's not a bad thing. It just means we had to be more creative about what we could accomplish within the constraints. ## What We Gained The trade-off is stability and security. The original Cheevos was at risk of breaking every time Firefox updated. The new version uses stable APIs that Mozilla has committed to supporting. It won't break unless we break it. The old version had full access to your browser. The new version has to declare exactly what it can do, and you can see that in the permissions dialog. If we ever wanted to add a feature that required new permissions, you'd know. The WebExtensions API is also cross-browser. The same codebase could theoretically work in Chrome or Edge with minimal changes. (Stay tuned for support in other browsers...) And Manifest V3's restrictions pushed us toward a privacy-first architecture. We can't send raw data to a server because the API makes it inconvenient. We have to process everything locally. That's better for you and better for us. ## The Future of Browser Extensions Browser extensions in 2026 are more limited than they were in 2011, but they're also more sustainable. The wild west era of XUL extensions produced some incredible software, but it wasn't built to last. Extensions broke constantly. Security was an afterthought. The barrier to entry was high (who wants to learn XPCOM?). Modern extensions are boring by comparison. They follow rules. They use well-defined APIs. They ask for permission before accessing your data. But they also work. And they'll keep working. And if you understand the constraints, you can still build interesting things. Cheevos exists because we think the gamification concept is worth preserving, even if we have to rebuild it from scratch using more restrictive tools. The browser wars gave us the Book of Mozilla. The XUL era gave us Firebug. The WebExtensions era gave us... well, we'll see what it gives us. We're betting on playful browsers and weird little extensions that don't need a business model. The tools are different now, but the spirit is the same. If you want to see what's possible with modern WebExtensions, [download Cheevos](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cheevos/). If you want to see what was possible in the XUL era, install Firefox and type `about:mozilla`. Both are worth experiencing. ]]> The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-02-20 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-02-20 Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/release-v1.0.6 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/release-v1.0.6 Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/browser-easter-eggs https://cheevosgame.com/blog/browser-easter-eggs Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT "And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days." This was 1995. Microsoft was gearing up to crush Netscape with Internet Explorer. The "beast" was a reference to the Netscape dinosaur mascot. The "house of the unbelievers" was Microsoft. The "tags that blink" was a jab at the widely-hated `` tag that Netscape had inflicted on the web. Later versions got more elaborate. Firefox's about:mozilla pages are styled in deep red with ornate typography. Each passage marks a major event: Netscape's death, Mozilla's rise from the ashes, the release of Firefox. The last official verse was added in 2020 and reads: > "The Beast continued its studies with renewed Focus, building great Reference works and contemplating new Realities. The Beast brought forth its followers and acolytes to create a renewed smaller form of itself and, through Mischievous means, sent it out across the world." GeckoView was a new lighter and faster library used for rendering web content on Android. Firefox Focus was the first to use it. A reference browser was introduced as a guide for developers using these new components. Firefox Reality was an open-source web browser developed by Mozilla specifically for standalone AR/VR headsets. It's dramatic, it's silly, and it's been sitting there in the codebase for over 20 years because someone decided it was worth keeping. ## Chrome's Dinosaur Game If you've ever lost your internet connection while using Chrome, you've seen the dinosaur. Press spacebar and it turns into a side-scrolling endless runner. Jump over cacti. Don't hit the pterodactyls. This isn't just a cute distraction. It's a remarkably well-designed easter egg that serves a real purpose: giving you something to do while you wait for your connection to come back. The game was added in 2014 by a small team of Chrome developers — Sebastien Gabriel, Alan Bettes, and Edward Jung. Gabriel designed the character and gave it its name. The dinosaur is named "Lonely T-Rex" in the code. The cacti get faster the longer you survive. At night the color scheme inverts. By 2018, it was being played over 270 million times per month — a stat the developers shared publicly. People set high score records. There are YouTube tutorials on advanced techniques. Some players have modded it to run at absurd speeds. None of this was planned. It was just a developer thinking, "What if we made this error page less depressing?" ## Opera's Hidden Games Opera used to be weird. Not in a bad way. In a "we're going to do whatever we want" way. In the 2000s, Opera had an entire secret game hidden in the browser. Type `opera:game` into the address bar and you'd get a text-based adventure game set inside the Opera Software office. You'd wander around the building, talk to developers, and solve puzzles to escape. There was also `opera:config`, which looked like a standard settings page but had dozens of experimental flags and developer tools hidden behind obscure names. Not quite an easter egg, but it had the same spirit: here's the whole engine, go play with it if you want. Modern Opera (post-2016 rebuild) has lost most of this personality. It's cleaner, faster, and much more boring. ## Internet Explorer's Developer Signatures Internet Explorer gets a bad reputation (deserved, mostly), but the IE team had their own tradition: signing their work. In IE6, if you opened the "About Internet Explorer" dialog and held down Ctrl+Alt, the developer team's names would scroll by like movie credits. Not hidden exactly, but not advertised either. Just a quiet acknowledgment that real people built this thing. IE's rendering engine (Trident) also had quirks mode, standards mode, and "almost standards mode" (which was unofficially called "we're trying our best mode" by developers who had to deal with it). The browser was a mess, but at least the team had a sense of humor about it. ## Firefox's Developer Easter Eggs Firefox has always been the most playful of the major browsers. Beyond the Book of Mozilla, there's `about:robots`, which displays a message in retro computer typography: > "We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill!" Clicking "Try Again" cycles through different button text and the page includes Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy references. There's also `about:config`, the advanced settings panel that starts with a warning that you might "void your warranty" (Firefox doesn't have a warranty). Power users ignore the warning and tweak hundreds of hidden settings. It's technically not an easter egg, but it has the same energy: here's the stuff we usually hide, go break things if you want. ## The Hidden Unicorn Pong Game And then there's the weirdest one: Firefox has a playable Pong game hidden in the toolbar customization screen. Yes, really. Right-click on the toolbar, select "Customize Toolbar," and then drag everything (except "Flexible Space") from the palette into the overflow menu. Keep dragging until the palette is basically empty. If you do this right, a small unicorn button appears at the bottom of the customization window. Click it. You get Pong, except your paddle is the "Flexible Space" toolbar element and the ball is a tiny unicorn. Use arrow keys to move. It's completely useless. It has nothing to do with browser functionality. The only way to find it is to basically introduce chaos into your browser's toolbar layout. And if you lose, you can click the unicorn button to play again.  This is the kind of thing that could never survive a modern product review. "Why are we shipping a Pong game in the toolbar customization screen?" "What's the user story?" "How does this align with our Q2 objectives?" But someone at Mozilla built it anyway, and someone else approved the merge request, and now it's just sitting there waiting for people who are bored enough to completely reorganize their toolbar. When you're done, you click "Restore Defaults" and pretend it never happened. Or leave the chaos so you can play again. ## What Happened? Easter eggs have mostly disappeared from modern browsers. Chrome still has the dinosaur. Firefox keeps the about: pages. But new ones aren't being added at the same rate. Why? Part of it is professionalism. Browsers are serious business now. Chrome has 3 billion users. Firefox is fighting for survival. There's no room for whimsy when you're optimizing load times and patching zero-day vulnerabilities. Part of it is legal risk. Easter eggs can introduce security vulnerabilities if they're not carefully reviewed. Hidden code paths mean more surface area for exploits. It's easier to just not do it. Part of it is corporate culture. Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple all have processes now. Code reviews, security audits, accessibility requirements. Adding a joke to the codebase means getting it through the same gauntlet as critical features. Most developers don't bother. But I think the biggest reason is that browsers stopped being passion projects and became products. Netscape developers added the Book of Mozilla because they were furious at Microsoft and wanted to leave their mark. Chrome developers added the dinosaur because they thought it would be funny. Opera developers built a text adventure game because they had the time and nobody stopped them. Modern browser development is faster, more secure, and far more polished. But it's also more corporate. Easter eggs don't have KPIs. They don't increase engagement metrics. They're just there for the sake of being there, which is a hard sell in a quarterly business review. ## Why We Care Cheevos exists because we think browsers should still have personality. Not every feature needs a business justification. Not every line of code needs to optimize for user retention. Sometimes you build something just because it's fun and you think other people might enjoy it too. The internet used to feel like a place where people hid jokes for each other to find. Now it feels like a shopping mall where everything is A/B tested and monetized. We're not saying we're going to save the internet with a browser extension that tracks achievements. But we are saying that the spirit behind Cheevos is the same spirit that gave us the Book of Mozilla, the Chrome dinosaur, and Opera's text adventure game. The web is better when it's weird. Browsers are better when they have personality. And if we can't get browser developers to add more easter eggs, we'll just build an extension that turns your entire browsing experience into one. If you want to try some of these easter eggs yourself: - Firefox: `about:mozilla`, `about:robots` - Chrome: Disconnect your internet and press spacebar on the error page - Edge: `edge://surf` (yes, really, they added a surfing game) The playful web isn't dead yet. It's just hidden in the about: pages. ]]> The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-02-13 https://cheevosgame.com/blog/weekly-digest-2026-02-13 Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/privacy-by-design https://cheevosgame.com/blog/privacy-by-design Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team https://cheevosgame.com/blog/welcome https://cheevosgame.com/blog/welcome Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Cheevos Team