Double-take, # 4

Bob Godiva has contributed this barely credible example of Chrome shooting itself in the foot (which I've edited slightly so the text can be seen more easily):

Late last month, in the Google Chrome Blog, someone styling herself 'Rachel Petterson, Software Engineer and Savvy Speller' announced the browser's new spell-checking tool. The post's URL and title make it clear that the misspelling is deliberate:

Link: Google Chrome Blog, 'Bettar spell chek in Chrome'

The Chrome team clearly assumes that users of its browser will instantly understand 'bettar spell chek' as intentional and that they all have a similar sense of humour.* However, various comments across the Internet show that not everyone does appreciate that these 'errors' are deliberate and/or intended to be amusing. Some people have castigated Chrome for carelessness. Some noticed only the 'bettar', not the 'chek', and thus didn't realize it was deliberate. In one exchange on a Google productforums page last Wednesday, someone promised to pass a user's irate complaint 'onto the correct team', and thus appeared to be a Google employee who had missed the point.‡

Unsurprisingly, the joke doesn't travel very well across cultures. Although Petterson's announcement specifically refers to support for non-English languages, the Chrome team seems unaware of the inherent issues in dealing with a multinational audience: for instance, you have to be fairly advanced in a foreign language to recognize and appreciate grammatical jokes.

Perhaps it would have been more obvious had the Chrome team misspelt spell as well; but, in the context of the widespread laxity in spelling and presentation on and off the Internet, the tag simply seems ill-judged.

* Also perhaps that they will avidly be reading every blog post ― who has the time?

‡ An exchange on a different Google productforums page two days later suggests that he has had it explained it to him and been put in charge of explaining it to other people…