491: Twitter
 Title text: If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave |
Explanation
This comic plays off of an old shaving cream product's Burma-Shave advertising campaign employed on American highways from 1925 to 1963. These ads used short poems, each line arranged sequentially on a sign along a highway, the last line always being "Burma Shave", the name of the shaving cream. Originally these ads only described the product, but others included driving safety messages.
XKCD uses the Alt-Text as a major part of the joke-telling -- on most browsers the Alt-Text shows as a "tool-tip" when the cursor is left hovering over the image. Firefox 2 had the longest announg bug where only a part of the alt-text were shown, creating a "burma-shave" effect of only being able to see some of the text. Unlike burma-shave where you would see the rest of the text as you were driving down the highway, Firefox didn't actually show you the rest of the text unless you left-clicked-show-property and you would be able to see a sideways scrollable field of the alt-text.
Transcript
- [Cueball is sitting in a caster office chair typing onto a smartphone]
- Beep beep
- Phone: "On Twitter feeds"
- [More typing]
- Phone: "an odd regression:"
- [More typing]
- Phone: "ancient memes"
- [More typing]
- Phone: "find new expression"
- [More typing]
- Phone: "Burma-Shave"
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refresh comments!Discussion
Just end every sentence in Burma Shave Spongebog (talk)
- Never tried this/It could work/I just need an idea/Wait, crap./Burma-Shave
Are we sure that Cueball is typing? It seems to me that he is getting a series of texts (or a series of tweets), because of the "Beep Beep" sound: cell phones typically don't beep when typing. --Troy0 (talk) 09:25, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
- I have to agree, add in that the zig-zag is used for external text usually, like the other end of a call. 173.245.56.154 20:35, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
- The transcript was accordingly edited. --Troy0 (talk) 04:05, 25 July 2014 (UTC
I don't think the title text explanation is correct. He's not suggesting you upgrade to "Burma Shave" - he's saying, "Upgrade from Firefox 2". Burma Shave just follows. I'll edit it. --108.162.216.54 12:55, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
This comic not appearing for me on the xkcd.com website, anyone else? 162.158.122.6 20:24, 15 December 2016 (UTC) For sale: baby shoes, never worn
