April Fools’ Day pranks on the web imply that we’re not trying to fool each other every day in web design anyway. Indeed, one of my favorite comments I received on an article was, “I can’t believe my eyes!” You shouldn’t, since web design relies on fooling the user’s brain by manipulating the way we process visual information via Gestalt laws, which make a website feel real.
April Fools’ Day on the web exemplifies what philosopher Jean Baudrillard called a deterrence machine — a single day on the calendar to celebrate funny fake news is like a theme park designed to make the fake constructs beyond its gates seem real by comparison. And oftentimes, the online pranks on April 1st are indistinguishable from the bizarreness that ensues all year round in the “real” virtual world.
Real things that looked like April Fools’ pranks
Tech has a history of April Fools’ Day announcements that remind me of what Philip K. Dick called “fake fakes,” emerging every year like real animals surreptitiously replacing the fake ones at Disneyland.
For instance, in 2004, people famously thought Gmail was an April Fools’ joke since it was announced on April 1st.
And on April Fools’ Day in 2013, long before the current generation of AI, Tom Murphy announced an AI that learns to play NES games. It was the real deal, even though he published the research paper and source code on “SIGBOVIK 2013, an April 1st conference that usually publishes fake research. Mine is real!” In Tom’s demo, the AI even devised the strategy of indefinitely pausing Tetris, because in that game on NES, “The only way to win is not to play.”
To give a more personal example of real tech that could be mistaken for an April Fools’ joke, my article on pure CSS collision detection was published on April 1st, 2025, my local time. I was amused when someone commented that using min to detect if a paddle was in range of a ball seemed like a clever hack that “brings up the question: Should game logic be done in CSS?” Of course it shouldn’t! I wasn’t seriously proposing this as the future of web game development.
I replied that if the commenter can take the idea seriously for a minute, it’s a testament to how far CSS has come as a language. It seems even funnier in hindsight, now that the range syntax has come to style queries, meaning we no longer need the min hack. So, maybe everyone should make games in CSS now, if the min hack was the only deal breaker (I kid because I love).
My CSS collision detection demo had a resurgence in popularity recently, when Chris Coyier chose it as a picked Pen. And in that CodePen, a comment again made me laugh: “Can it be multiplayer/online?” Yet, once I stopped laughing, I found myself trying to get a multiplayer mode working. Whether I can or not, I guess the joke’s on me for taking CSS hacking too seriously.
The thing is, much of what we have on the web this year seemed unthinkable last year.
Even the story of the origin of April Fool’s Day sounds like a geeky April Fools’ joke — the leading theory is that the 15th-century equivalent of the Y2K bug had some foolish people incorrectly celebrating the new year on April 1st when the Pope changed the calendars in France from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. And — April Fools’ again! — that’s a legend nobody has been able to prove happened.
But whichever way you feel about the constant disruptions at the heart of the evolution of tech, the disruptions work like pranks by flipping common narratives on their heads in the same way April Fools’ Day does. With that in mind, let’s go through history with an eye for exploring the core of truth inside the jokes of April Fools’ Days passed.
Note: These are the historical pranks I consider the top 10 most noteworthy, rather than the “best.” You’ll see that some of them crossed the line and/or backfired.
Google April Fools’ games
Google is famous for its April Fools’ pranks, but they’ve also historically blurred the line between pranks and features. For example, on April 1st 2019, Google introduced a temporary easter egg that transformed Google Calendar into a Space Invaders game. It was such a cool “joke” that nowadays, there’s a Chrome extension that offers a similar experience, turning your Google Calendar into a Breakout game. This extension also offers the option to actually delete items that your ball hit from your calendar at the end of a game.
On April Fools’ Day the same year as the original calendar game, Google also released a feature that allowed Google Maps users to play Snake on maps.
Personal Sidenote: The Google gag inspired an unreleased game I once made with an overworld that’s a gamified calendar, in which your character is trying to avoid an abusive partner by creating excuses not to be at home at the same time as their partner, but that’s a little dark for April Fools’.
Prank npm packages
In March 2016, a legit — if arguably trivial — eleven-line package was deleted from the npm registry after its creator decided to boycott npm. Turns out that deletion disrupted big companies whose code relied on the left-pad package and this prompted npm to change its policies on which packages can be deleted. I mention this because the humour of the npm packages released as jokes often revolves around poking fun at JavaScript developers’ overuse of dependencies that might not be needed.
Here is a 0kb npm package called vanilla-javascript and a page for the Vanilla JS “framework” that is always 0kb, no matter which features you add to the “bundle.” It lists all the JavaScript frameworks as “plugins.” Some of the dependent packages for vanilla-javascript are quite funny. I like false-js, which ensures true and false are defined properly. The library can be initialized with the settings disableAprilFoolsSideEffects, definitelyDisableAprilFoolsSideEffects, and strictDisableAprilFoolsSideEffectsCheck. If you read the source code, there is a comment saying, “Haha, this code is obfuscated, you’ll never figure out what happens on April Fools.”
There is also this useless library to get the current day. It seems plausible till you look carefully at the website and the description: “This package is ephemeral for April Fools’ Day and will be removed at some point.“ The testimonials from fictional time-traveling characters are also a bit of a giveaway, and you have to love that he updated it every day for months, “because… why not? 🤷♂️”
More “terrible npm packages” for April Fools’ are here.
aprilFools.css
There’s another category of dependencies that are functional but used for playing April Fools pranks. For instance, aprilFools.css by Wes Bos, which has a comment at the top saying:
/*
I assume no responsibility for angry co-workers or lost productivity
Put these CSS definitons into your co-workers Custom.css file.
They will be applied to every website they visit as well as their developer tools.
*/It does things like use CSS transforms to turn the page upside down.
It strikes me that following the advice in the comments could be a slippery slope to a dark place of workplace bullying, if you were to try it on the wrong coworker, just because they left their computer unlocked. As Chris Coyier pointed out in his post on practical jokes in the browser:
“Fair warning on this stuff… you gotta be tasteful. Putting someone’s stapler in the jello is pretty hilarious unless it’s somehow a family heirloom, or it’s someone who’s been the target of a little too much office prankery to the point it isn’t funny anymore.”
April Fool’s pranks using VS Code Extensions
While we’re on the topic of behavior that blurs the line between pranks and workplace bullying, let’s talk about this list of VS Code Extensions that could be used to prank a coworker by causing their code editor UI to behave unexpectedly. Most of the examples sound funny and harmless, like having the IDE intermittently pop up “Dad Jokes” or make funny sounds when typing. Changing the code editor to resemble Slack using a theme is also funny.
Then there’s the last example that made me do a double-take: “Imagine hitting CTRL + S to save your work and then it gets erased!” Yeah, if I were interviewing someone and they mentioned they consider this a funny joke, I would end the interview there. And if anyone ever does this to me, I’m going to HR.
Pranks by the W3C
I don’t think of the W3C as having a sense of humor, although I guess getting me excited about HTML imports back in the day, only to discontinue them, was funny in hindsight, if you have a dark sense of humor. Nevertheless, they have posted pranks on their official website, such as restyling to make their page look like a nineties GeoCities website in 2012, or claiming they were reviving the <blink> tag in 2021. There’s a theme of playing on the nostalgia of people my age who want these things to be real.
Sidenote: If you want more Nineties internet experiences, the game Hypnospace Outlaw, set on a retro internet in an alternative 1999, might be up your alley.
Other sites over the years have played a similar joke, which can never fail to charm an old-timer like me who remembers using a web like this at the public library, back when the internet was too expensive for my family to afford at home.
StackOverflow retro restyle
I can’t get enough of these nostalgia trips, so here’s what StackOverflow looked like on April Fools’ Day in 2019. They turned the site “full GeoCities” for fun. Yet everything comes full circle. Now StackOverflow itself seems destined to become as fossilized as GeoCities. Even so, the site is currently attempting a new, real redesign to survive rather than for fun. It’s sobering to consider that maybe the only StackOverflow experience for the next generation of coders will be if ChatGPT gets a StackOverflow restyle on a future April Fools’.
Stack Egg
While we’re on the topic of StackOverflow, their Stack Egg prank from 2015 was very cool, but it might win my award for the most over-engineered April Fools’ prank that caused the most serious problems for a website. The premise was another Nineties throwback, this time to the nineties Tamagotchi craze.
The idea, as the creator describes it, was that every site on the Stack Exchange network would have its own “Stack Egg,” representing that site. The goal was to collaboratively keep your metaphorical “site” alive using hypothetical actions named after real actions on the site, such as upvotes to feed the Tamagotchi, and review actions to clean up the poop so the Tamagotchi doesn’t get sick.
It was a nifty concept, although like Google’s April Fools’ games, it’s more neat than laugh-out-loud funny. The part that does make me laugh — I don’t feel too guilty saying it since it was more than a decade ago — was that this is a game about keeping the websites alive, and it inadvertently DDoS-ed its own websites and took down the whole StackExchange network.
And yet, the creators thought the fact that they had the foresight to implement a feature flag that allowed switching it off meant this was a case study in “Operational Excellence in AFPs (April Fools’ Pranks).” Yep, that is an actual article published in a peer-reviewed journal. According to the article, the engineers involved pushed a fix about two hours later to salvage the prank. Code Golf was the winner of the game, in case you’re wondering. According to the same post that announced the winner, “it’s by no means designed to withstand exploits,” and in the two days the feature was live, users discovered a vulnerability that was “close to voting fraud.”
I mentioned the over-engineering, so here’s the part that makes the unintentional punchline even funnier: rather than investing more time guarding against the basics, such as not bringing down the website and considering security, the creator spent time making his own Turing-complete language to handle the LCD-style animations, “because I wanted to! Creating a programming language is fun.”
That’s such a classically geeky way to prioritize!
Google Mic Drop
If Stack Egg created the most issues I’ve ever heard of for a website that created the prank, the most mean-spirited high-profile UI prank — which caused the most problems for users — has to be Google Mic Drop. It dropped (pun intended) on April Fools’ Day 2016, shortly after Google changed its motto from “don’t be evil” to “do the right thing.” Then, they promptly redefined the “right thing” as sabotaging people’s professional reputations with a minion GIF.
Google added a button, nice and close to the regular “Send” button in Gmail, that would send a farewell message to the recipient with an animated Minion dropping a mic then block all emails from that recipient permanently, without prompting the sender to confirm first. Better still, there was a bug that meant the recipient could receive that “GIF of death” and the block, even if the sender managed to press the correct “Send” button in the confusing new UI.
The “hilarity” that ensued included:
- A funeral home accidentally sent a mic drop and block to a grieving family.
- A man posted on the Gmail help forum, “Thanks to Mic Drop, I just lost my job.”
Google disabled the feature before the end of April Fools’ Day and issued an apology saying, “It looks like we pranked ourselves this year.” I am not sure how the joke was on Google, so much as the people whose livelihoods and relationships were destroyed.
Remember when I said in the intro that April Fools’ is a distraction from how the joke is on us for believing that the web is what it seems? This Google prank was a reminder that if you believe an advertising company masquerading as a search company has the judgment and ethics to prioritize your interests, when they hoard your personal data and don’t actually care if you can find anything, the real mic drop moment is when you realize that your career and relationships are a data point in Google’s next A/B test.
Prank UI/UX research articles
The funniest part of these April Fools’ UI/UX advice articles is that they’re published by a serious, high-profile consultancy and research group, so the authors work hard to make it obvious these are April Fools’ hoaxes. In each article, “APRIL FOOLS” is in the title in ALL CAPS. And in the first paragraph of the newer hoax articles: “This article was published as an April Fool’s hoax and does not contain real recommendations.” I like to imagine the marketing department thought this was a great idea, and then the authors of the articles tried their best not to make fools of themselves. I noticed the group stopped posting hoax content after 2022.
Sidenote: Educational resources people rely on as a source may not be the best place for prank posts. It reminds me of this peer-reviewed radiology website that on April Fools ‘ Day 2015 posted a hoax X-ray image under the title “Ectopia cordis interna – Tin(Man) syndrome.” Over the years, medical professionals circulated the image unaware it was a hoax, and then, in 2025, six medical journal case studies involving the made-up condition had to be retracted.
Actually, the hoax UI/UX articles are educational, in a UI antipatterns kind of way, such as “Users Love Change: Combatting a UX Myth,” which advocates redesigning the UI as often as possible for the heck of it — except I can’t help but feel JIRA took that advice literally. The “Canine UX” article teaches ideas of user personas and design in a fun way. And “The User Experience of Public Bathrooms” reads as if George Costanza from Seinfeld turned his toilet obsession into a lesson in usability.
DigitalOcean buys codepen.io
Regular readers of CSS-Tricks know that the founder, Chris Coyier, really did decide in 2022 to sell the website to our current stewards, DigitalOcean, so that he could focus on his other projects, such as CodePen. Therefore, the announcement on CodePen that DigitalOcean was also buying that website seemed maddeningly plausible. The level of detail in the hoax announcement increased verisimilitude. For instance, the claim that users could use custom domain names on CodePen for free, as long as the domain was DigitalOcean-hosted. In fact, the only sign it was a prank is that nobody anywhere announced anything like this, unless you count me posting it today on a DigitalOcean-owned website.
Happy April Fools’ Day, everyone!
Front-End Fools: Top 10 April Fools’ UI Pranks of All Time originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.