Opening 100 tabs in Google Chrome Mobile gets you a smiley face

Today I learned something new; Google Chrome Mobile has an Easter egg that turns the tab count into a smiley face when you have over 100 tabs.

For the past couple of weeks, my Chrome Mobile's tab count has been showing a smiley face rather than the normal tab count.

In between other things, I poked around the settings to figure out what causes it, but never really made an effort to look into it. That is until today when my son said: "Cool, you have a smiley face in your browser!"

:) Easter egg

It turns out that Chrome Mobile has had an Easter egg for years that causes a smiley face to display instead of the tab count if you have over 100 tabs.

While it would be fun to think that the smiley face is shown because you are feeding the browser so much memory, the more likely reason is that the Google developers didn't want to increase the size of the tab count box to display 3 characters.

By showing a smiley face instead of 100, the user interface does not need to be changed and they can continue to display two characters in the same sized box.

Still, it's a fun little Easter egg, and if you see it, you now know that you have 100+ tabs open and maybe it's time to do a little pruning.