The Burger Bug

Whimsy has a long tradition in software development. The default contact picture in Microsoft Outlook 2010 is a silhouette of Bill Gate's mugshot from his 1977 traffic arrest, for example.  This blog describes a classic piece of software whimsy from the Google Chrome browser bug archive.  I hasten to add that whimsey plays no part in our products.  This blog post is merely an interesting war story for developer amusement.

Take a look at the Chrome bug report filed a few years ago at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=125981.   It complains that the cheese in the Chrome cheeseburger icon is in the wrong place in the bun!   The picture below shows a large version of the cheeseburger icon, as well as the graphic that the bug submitter provided to demonstrate the issue.  

You have to admit, the bug submitter appears to be right.  The bug submitter uses the word "cutlet" instead of "patty" because he is not a native English speaker.   Why would anyone submit such a bug?  Because they can.  The Google Chrome engineers played along with the fun, adding comments to the bug report like “Keep in mind that it would be harder to see both the cheese and the meat clearly if the cheese were between the meat and the lettuce, where it belongs. Sometimes we have to make these difficult sacrifices to improve usability.”  Someone dug up a picture from McDonalds of a burger with similar low altitude cheese positioning.  Many subsequent comments in the report are hilarious.  People started submitting designs for a new burger icon, and one guy in Australia even claimed that they put beetroot on their burgers (horrifying, if true).

I wanted to get a comment from the burger bug submitter himself for this blog post, so I emailed him.  The burger bug submitter is a student and a web designer whom I’ll call “Eugene”, because that’s his name.  He lives in a small town about 600 miles east of Moscow.  It’s wonderful how the internet brings practical jokers together from across the world.  Eugene emailed back to say he did not want to be interviewed, probably in the mistaken belief that I deprecated his work rather than admiring it. The last line of his email (perhaps) holds the key to Eugene’s motivation in filing the burger bug report.  It read simply, in Russian,

Отправлено с iPhone

which translates as ""sent from my iPhone"".  When the bug was filed, and for some years after, it was not possible to set Google Chrome as the default browser on the iPhone.   And there you have it.  Eugene most likely considered that a bug that Apple would not fix, and he wanted to test Google's policy on bugfixing the iOS version of Chrome.  They say ""it takes all sorts to make the world.""  But it doesn't really.  We just have all sorts.   What is your favorite bug war story?