The Sad Tab is the “I’ve Died” image for the new Google Chrome web browser. Simply put, it means whatever the web page on that tab was trying to do has expired, ceased to be, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an Ex-Tab. Whatever you were doing on that tab has gone and you had better start again.

The reasons behind the Sad Tab’s appearance are varied. It could be a bug in the Google Chrome browser. Or it could be that the Javascript or plug-in running on that page did something really really bad. Whatever the reason it appears it means the process is now gone but Chrome’s promised technology should mean that it doesn’t take the whole of the web browser with it. So no longer will one badly behaved page take down those twelve other tabs you had spent hours carefully collating as reference for your next killer blog post.

The Sad Tab is one of a number of Screens of Death, images that indicate everything has gone pear shaped. Most are accidentally iconic such as Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death that plagues Windows 95 onwards. Some are more deliberate like Apple’s Sad Mac, Sad IPod or Bomb images. Online services have generated even more failure messages, notable the Twitter Fail Whale that appears whenever Twitter is overloaded.

How iconic the Sad Tab becomes depends on the quality of Google’s new browser. If it is as well written as they suggest then the Sad Tab should almost never appear. Only truly badly behaved web pages will create it. On the other hand, if Google have been hiring ex-Microsoft programmers, then it will be a common sight to all.

So let us salute the Sad Tab. May we never, ever see you!