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December 22nd, 2011, 22:20 GMT · By

YouTube Adds a Snowy Surprise Just in Time for Christmas

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YouTube's snowy video player
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It seems Google is not done with the winter holiday celebrations and Easter Eggs. It may not snow much, or at all, in Mountain View, California, but there's plenty of snow on Google sites.

The latest to be added do the list is YouTube, which now gets a snow-making option which, you guessed it, makes it snow inside the video player.

On videos that are not monetized, i.e. the ones without ads next to them or in them, you'll notice there's a new snowflake button, next to the video options.

Click on it and huge snowflakes will start falling inside the video window and slowly build up at the bottom. Leave them to accumulate for long enough and they'll slowly take up the entire window. To prevent that from happening, some of the snowflakes melt away in time.  

One nice touch is that any mouse movement will sway the falling snowflakes one way or another. Falling snow is hardly an original idea, but the way YouTube implemented it is pretty neat. Another nice touch is the snowflake video position slider.

This isn't exactly an Easter Egg, since it's there for anyone to see, but it is part of the series of little surprises like this that Google has dotted across its sites this year.

For example, any search related to Christmas will trigger a custom results page with Christmas ornaments. The same goes for Hannukah.

Slightly more hidden, searching for "let it snow" will add falling snow to the search results page. The page will also slowly freeze over, but you can use the mouse to clean it up. There's also a "Defrost" button to clean everything in one go. Christmas is almost here, but there is still a chance that Google will unveil some similar surprises in the days to come.

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