Google Gravity

The moment the page stops holding itself up

Every piece on the panel is moulded clay, so the collapse has some weight to it. Hit the drop button and the search bar, the buttons, the nav links and all six letters give up at once. They tumble, hit the bottom edge, bounce badly, and end up in a heap with the letter g lying on its side across the search box. Nothing breaks. It just collapses.

Then you grab a piece and throw it, and that is where most people stop reading whatever they came for.

Three different kinds of falling

Normal gravity is quick and heavy, everything lands within a second and a half. Moon gravity stretches that out into long lazy arcs where a thrown letter can cross the whole window before touching down. The water setting is the strangest of the three, pieces sink rather than fall, and a hard throw dies almost immediately as if the whole box were full of syrup. People searching for google gravity water are usually after exactly that.

Rubber floor is the one to leave on if you want chaos. Restitution goes high enough that nothing ever settles, and the pile keeps shuffling itself for as long as you leave the tab open.

Throwing properly

Speed carries over when you release, so a flick sends a letter spinning off the wall. Drag slowly and let go and it just drops. The rotation is tied to horizontal speed, which is why a fast throw makes the letter cartwheel and a gentle one does not.

Where it came from

It was never an official feature. Ricardo Cabello built the original as a demo of a JavaScript physics engine, it got picked up by the lucky button, and the name stuck so hard that people still assume it was made in house. The google gravity easter egg is probably the single most shared item on this list.

The natural next step is google gravity black hole, which replaces the floor with something that eats the pieces instead of catching them. google floating runs the same idea upside down, and google gravity roll is what people mean when they want the page spinning rather than falling. Everything else is filed under google easter eggs.

Reset behaviour

Standing it back up rebuilds the layout from scratch and clears every physics setting, so you always start from the same tidy arrangement. Resizing the window while nothing has fallen re-centres it too.