Quiet tabs

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.

A free host for handmade personal sites in the Neocities spirit, with a browse page full of members' pages to click through.

A free host built as a deliberate successor to GeoCities, full of hand-written personal pages by people who wanted to make one.

A permanent vaporwave station with fake adverts, a virtual room and album art on a CRT, running continuously for about a decade.

Rain, wind, fan and coffee-shop loops you layer into one background mix, then save as a preset for the rest of the week.

Minecraft skin editor with a 3D preview you can spin, plus a gallery of other people's skins to take apart and reuse.

One well-sourced strange story per weekday, told at exactly the length of a cup of coffee.

London online radio with thousands of shows in the archive, most presented by somebody with an unreasonable record collection.

Physically modelled sea you can retune — wind speed, swell, choppiness — rendering waves that behave properly.

Radio drama, comedy and serials from before television took over, in quantities that would take several lifetimes to finish.

One minute of footage from a park somewhere in the world, matched to the exact minute you happen to be watching.

Hand-curated index of several thousand active blogs, sorted by subject, for when you want writing rather than a feed.

A catalogue page for every book ever published, a good many of them borrowable straight in the browser.

A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.

Fold a paper plane, throw it, and catch one somebody launched in another country. Nothing else happens, which is the point.

A plain list of personal websites, each added by its owner. Pick any name and you land on somebody's homepage, built exactly how they like it.

Grid, palette, mouse. The whole tool fits on one page and you are drawing about three seconds after it loads.

Type in the thing you are stressed about, watch it shrink into a distant star over sixty seconds, then close the tab.

Sprite editor with layers and animation frames, wrapped in an unusually friendly community gallery of other people's work.

A virtual table with real decks you drag around by hand, for playing whatever house rules your group refuses to drop.

A pastel multiplayer world whose real draw is the character creator, where people spend far longer than in the game itself.

An eternal-summer radio station dressed as an old Macintosh desktop, playing the soundtrack to a holiday you never actually took.

A medieval life simulator where you idle through jobs and skills, die of old age, and are reborn with a small head start.

Seventy thousand public domain books, plain and free, from the oldest digital library on the internet.

A cat purr you tune by size, mood and breathing rate, for people who work better with a notional cat on the desk.

Daily nonograms in every size from five squares to fifty, with a timer and no attempt whatsoever at decoration.

Free monthly puzzle sets designed to be solved in a pub, with a decade of archives you can print at home.

Five thousand strips of indie-rock relationship comedy with sarcastic robots, updating every weekday since 2003.

Guided meditation for people who have never meditated, starting at two minutes and never once mentioning chakras.

The internet's default supply of small animals doing small things, restocked constantly by thirty million subscribers.

Human-curated and listener-supported, mixed like an album rather than a playlist, at an absurdly high bitrate if you want it.

A browser railway empire where the whole server races to reach the same era of engines before anybody else does.

Half an hour of rain and distant thunder on a loop, running since before background noise was a productivity category.

The first Samorost, free in the browser, a wordless point-and-click about a small gnome diverting a planet off a collision course.

Live cameras on pandas, penguins, apes and elephants, with keepers wandering into shot at feeding time and narrating as they go.

A daily high-resolution photograph from the early twentieth century, usually with commenters identifying the buildings.

Symmetrical generative art that blooms under the cursor, which everybody who touches it turns into a wallpaper factory.

Live HD cameras on piazzas, beaches and ski slopes across Europe and beyond, which is the closest a browser tab gets to a day trip.

An endless procedurally generated drive through mountains and deserts, with no traffic, no timer and nothing to hit.

The National Zoo's cameras on lions, elephants and naked mole rats, publicly funded and refreshingly free of any advertising.

Giant pandas eating bamboo, live from Washington, on the webcam that periodically takes down the zoo's own servers.

Deb Perelman cooking from a famously tiny New York kitchen since 2006, testing everything obsessively and writing about it well.

An endless sheet of virtual bubble wrap that pops under the cursor and quietly refills itself behind you.

Clean solitaire collection with hints, statistics and daily challenges spread across a dozen different variants.

Daily solitaire challenges dealt from guaranteed-winnable shuffles, with a leaderboard for people who want the streak.