![Cover image for 🐍 Snake - rendered with 576 browser windows [warning - this WILL hurt your eyes...and PC!]](https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=1000,height=420,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fi2euxvroeov67ei6299m.png)
I have been quiet lately I know - but don't worry I haven't forgotten you all and how much you like seeing really stupid ideas on the web!
This on...
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T r u s t i t.
I saw a video of someone did something similar, but they use the WHOLE computer. The idea is the snake is made of apps on your computer. He made it if it eats System32, the computer crashes lol.
I love that! Even more chaotic! haha
I don't know anyone less afraid of thinking outside the box than you Graham. Try getting an AI to come up with that...
That is the scary thing now - AI lets me build the scary scary thoughts far more easily :-P
The broken-link checker case is the interesting one, and there's a failure mode lurking in it that snake doesn't expose: once you
window.opena cross-origin target on the right, you keep theWindowProxyhandle but you lose almost everything through it. You can still call.close()and reassign.location.href, but reading.location.pathname,.document, or the final resolved URL after a redirect throws on the cross-origin boundary. So for the paywall/SPA case you flagged — where a 200 lies to you — the opener can't actually confirm what landed. You're back to a human eyeballing it, which is fine, just worth being explicit that the window gives you a viewport, not a probe.The other sharp edge is popup grouping heuristics. Chrome treats a burst of
window.opencalls differently from one triggered directly in a user-gesture handler — 576 windows works because you've got the always-allow grant, but the "two windows that feel like one app" demo is fragile the moment the open isn't synchronously inside the click handler. Await anything beforewindow.openand the gesture is spent, so the second window silently doesn't open. Worth opening both up front and just reassigning.locationafter, rather than opening on demand.Hahahaha this is crazy 🤩🤣
Next, have snake, but every time it eats an apple, it spawns a new window somewhere and segments the play area to include it, but you dont know which part till you see it. That way it starts as a memory game and very soon becomes near impossible to keep up with.
Hahaha, would love to see it!
I also thought that you could play a detective game where there is one window and you track where it is moved on screen and items appear, like a magic magnifying glass type thing!
Oooh that can work, if you use window coordinates, you can have the browser act as 'x-ray vision' that does a negative of the background behind it and you need to find a hidden object hiding somewhere, eg. behind an icon.
576 windows just to play Snake — this is the kind of beautiful, completely unnecessary engineering I live for. My poor GPU fan is already spinning up just reading the title. Did the snake ever get self-conscious about being watched from 576 different angles at once? Also, genuine question: did your window manager survive, or did this take a few casualties along the way?😄😃
Surprisingly it all worked fine on my PC (but it is pretty beefy) - started to flicker a bit but still playable!
This is so chaotic in the best possible way 😂 Turning 576 browser windows into Snake is such a ridiculous idea, but I love that it somehow leads to a genuinely useful workflow for checking broken links.
The whole series is me doing really stupid things to demonstrate / learn a useful technique!
Glad you enjoyed the chaos! hahaha
This reminds me of theannoyingsite.com/ 😅
Damn 😂. And I thought I was crazy
This is one of the most creative browser experiments I've seen in a while! 😄 I love how you keep pushing web technologies far beyond their intended use just to see what's possible. The technical challenge is impressive, and the warning in the title definitely wasn't an exaggeration—my browser fan started working overtime. Great work!
Haha I do like to stress people's computers out - its a little less strain than the doom rendered with a linear gradient at least :-)
Going to have to start getting insurance incase someone sues me for their computer blowing up! hahaha
The broken link checker use case is the real gem here. It proves that the value of an API is not in the spectacle but in the simple interface that enables complex behavior underneath. That is exactly the design principle behind the Human Card in Opportunity Skill. On the surface it is just an image with a machine-readable ID, the QR code analogy is deliberate. Underneath, the recipient agent retrieves structured data, evaluates semantic match quality, and decides whether to initiate contact. Simple interface, complex behavior, zero coordination required.
What was your high score?
Think I got to 44 before I gave up!
Does this inspire you to build anything interesting / cool (or silly I suppose :-P)
cool, can it work on two different browser: chrome and edge resized as a SPA?
I would imagine it COULD work - but you would have to have a server handling communication via websockets at that point as the two different browsers would not be able to talk to each other directly via JS.
wow!
I had so much fun. I have 3 monitor setup, would be cool if the snake could travel across monitors ;)
Seriously, I had fun. Looking forward to more wonderfully weird things from this series :)
Thank you for the fun!
OMG this is one of the most useful applications of software I have ever seen 🤣 Thank you
snake so terrible
Snake across multiple monitors would be crazy. I kinda wanna try it now LOL. @granny
Good coverage of the fundamentals. For teams working at scale, I'd also recommend setting up strict ESLint configuration — catching these anti-patterns at lint time saves hours of runtime debugging.