14 DAY TRIAL // Google is mounting a full on assault on April Fools' Day. It started with several big, elaborate, pranks in the morning, but people have been stumbling upon the more subtle ones throughout the day. Google teams are battling each other to come up with the best prank. Here are a couple more that surfaced during the day.
Helvetica vs. Comic Sans
Comic Sans has been the scourge of any self-respecting designer out there. The font is so hated it even has entire movements dedicated to eradicating it. Designers, apparently, have plenty of free time on their hands.
But, as much as they hate Comic Sans, they love Helvetica, only the best font ever created. Google doesn't care much for aesthetics though, it relies on cold hard facts.
"Following some rigorous user testing of 41 different fonts, investigating how each affected user experience, we discovered one font consistently outperformed all others when it comes to user satisfaction, level of engagement, understanding web content, productivity, click-through rates and conversion rates: Comic Sans," Google explained.
And Google is looking to convert everyone to this belief. Search for 'helvetica' on Google and you'll have a surprise, the entire site will use Comic Sans rather than the standard font.
But Google has a solution if you want a more permanent change as well, just install the Comic Sans for Everyone extension for Google Chrome and every site you ever visit will be transformed with the glorious font.
ChromeLite: lightning-fast text-based browsing
But maybe, to you, the way websites look are secondary to how fast they load. Enter the ChromeLite, an extension that strips out all the unnecessary elements from the sites you visit, things like scripts, plugins, images or even colors.
"ChromeLite dramatically simplifies the user experience of web browsing by rendering the entire web in plain text. Users won’t have to worry about various media codecs and browser plug-ins to view much of the content on the web today," the Chrome team explained.
"Preliminary analysis by our top-notch security team also suggests that running ChromeLite reduces your susceptibility to targeted exploits on the web by removing a popular attack surface: color," Google added.
