Quiet tabs

Hand-drawn-looking diagrams that somehow stay legible, with live collaboration and no account. The whiteboard for people who hate whiteboards.

The largest collection of live nature cams anywhere: bear falls, puppy rooms, osprey nests and coral reefs, all free and always running.

A fidget spinner you flick with the mouse, with physics good enough that people leave it running in a spare tab.

A toy about synchronisation — a few hundred blinking dots that agree on a rhythm with no conductor anywhere.

A browser home screen with a clock, timer, lofi and a to-do list, arranged to look calmer than your actual desktop.

A gentler descendant of Diep.io where you assemble a ring of petals around a flower and farm increasingly rude insects.

Paint with thick wet oils that pile up, smear and catch the light exactly like the real thing, entirely in a browser tab.

Plant a virtual tree that dies if you pick up your phone, which works on far more adults than anybody wants to admit.

City building from the Stone Age to the near future, with a tactical battle grid and guilds fighting over a shared continent.

A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.

A large casual portal aimed squarely at people who want a match-three game and no further conversation about it.

A browsable restoration of the GeoCities neighbourhoods, so you can wander into Area51 or SunsetStrip the way people once did.

One mystery country a day, guessed by warmth — every wrong answer shades the globe a little closer to the right one.

Solitaire variants you have never heard of, with a hint button and an interface built by somebody who actually plays them.

Free cryptic, quick and Everyman crosswords every day, plus the setter blogs that explain each diabolical clue afterwards.

A sheet of bubble wrap that never runs out. Pop with a click or drag across a row, and it refills the moment you finish.

Where interactive fiction authors argue about parser design, post works in progress and review each other with alarming thoroughness.

Turn any photograph into a jigsaw of up to three hundred pieces, then send the link to a relative who will finish it faster.

Multiplayer jigsaws where several people drag pieces around the same table at once, mostly getting in each other's way.

Japanese home cooking explained for people without a Japanese pantry, with substitutions that do not quietly ruin the dish.

Seattle public radio with the famous in-studio live sessions, a human DJ on air at all hours and a playlist page that credits everything.

Anime and manga tracker with a friendly interface and a public API, run as an open-source project rather than an ad business.

A text-based village of kittens that grows into a civilisation over weeks, with a spreadsheet's soul and startling depth.

Painting app with layers, symmetry and a genuinely good brush engine, loading instantly and uploading nothing anywhere.

Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.

Tarot taught properly, with free card meanings, a clean illustrated deck and lessons that never ask you to believe anything.

Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.

Public domain books read aloud by volunteers, free to download, uneven in quality and endless in supply.

Every Wikipedia edit as it happens, rendered as bells and strings, with each new user announced by a whisper.

Start with four elements and work towards seven hundred, most of which are jokes you only understand on arrival.

A quiet turn-based server for abstract strategy games — Hex, TwixT, Amazons — where matches last months and nobody rushes you.

Cameras pointed at geysers, glaciers, harbours and whichever volcano is currently misbehaving, plus a northern lights feed in winter.

Live air traffic control audio from towers around the world, so you can listen to a controller sequencing arrivals into Heathrow while you work.

The endless study-beats stream that turned into a genre, plus the label archive behind the girl who never stops revising.

A looping animated café with lofi streams and rain sliders, built to be left open in a corner of the screen all day.

Deliberately tiny paint tool inside a fake old window, with fat pixels and a palette that makes clumsy art look intentional.

Kaleidoscopic drawing surface with adjustable mirror counts, so one wobbly line comes back as a symmetrical mandala.

Old School RuneScape's skill grind distilled into a pure idle game, with a free browser version that genuinely never ends.

The Star Trek wiki, maintained with the rigour of a national archive and roughly the same word count.

Hundreds of matching-pair memory games plus Simon-style sequences, scaled from toddler difficulty to genuinely unpleasant.

Proper miniature golf courses with believable putting physics and no time pressure applied at any point.

Live cameras on the kelp forest, the aviary and the open sea tank, plus a sea otter feed that has ended many working afternoons.

A live tank of sea nettles drifting in blue water, which has been the internet's default calming video for years.

Long beatless mixes chosen for the state of mind where code actually goes in, delivered as plain numbered episodes.

A simulated television set showing nothing but 1980s programming and adverts, complete with channel dial and static between stations.

The same idea moved a decade forward. Flip channels through the nineties and land somewhere between a cartoon and a cereal advert.

Hundreds of calibrated soundscapes with ten-slider equalisers, built by an audio engineer who takes tinnitus relief seriously.

The official live stream, which for long stretches is simply Earth turning below the space station.