...who cribbed it from old-school Apple. The original design for the "Sad Tab"[1] is fairly similar to the Sad Mac[2] errors from the original Macintosh. This sort of error screen isn't a totally original design.

[1] https://skitch.com/constantinexvi/f3ybu/new-tab (Chrome originally used this design everywhere, but now use a mildly different one outside of Mac builds)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sad_mac.png