Quiet tabs

Klondike that loads in under a second, with nothing on the page except green baize and the cards.

Listener-funded, advert-free channels out of San Francisco, Drone Zone and Groove Salad among them, going since the dial-up era.

Grid sequencer with a marimba and a drum kit, tuned so that anything you tap sounds passable, then shared as a link.

A daily letter grid with dozens of words buried in it, plus a bonus list that runs on far longer than anyone expects.

Public domain classics reset properly — typography fixed, typos corrected, covers designed — and then given away.

The planetarium in a browser tab — set your location and it shows exactly what is above you right now.

Long-form serialised fiction with a reader built for actually reading — chapter memory, no pop-ups, no interruptions.

A word search with a theme you have to deduce first, and one spangram threading corner to corner through the grid.

Round-the-clock video study rooms full of strangers revising in silence, with pomodoro timers ticking in the corner.

Clean daily sudoku across five difficulties, with a notes mode that behaves the way a pencil is supposed to.

Base building with tameable pets, farming and raids, which is a lot of systems for something that loads instantly.

Scroll from the surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, meeting every creature at the depth it actually lives.

A quarterly printed newspaper of good news and everyday heroes, illustrated throughout, with the archive online.

Timeline readings that describe periods rather than days, phrased as amateur psychology rather than fortune telling.

A free course that starts on the home row and builds up, with keyboard layouts for whichever language you actually type in.

Type anything at all and watch it drift upward and dissolve. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, nothing can be recovered.

Pour coloured sand into layered dunes with the mouse, which is considerably more absorbing than it has any right to be.

Fifty years of home renovation broken into how-tos, with actual tradespeople explaining why the obvious shortcut fails.

Cast, catch, sell, upgrade the line, cast deeper. The loop is completely transparent and it still takes forty minutes off you.

A rescue that livestreams its foster kittens and feral colonies around the clock, with vets narrating in the chat.

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs and they come back far smaller with no visible difference. Nothing else to learn.

A quick whiteboard in the browser: sketch boxes, arrows and doodles, share a link and draw together in real time without making an account.

Tap any key in rhythm and it plays the next chunk of Clair de Lune, so timing is the only skill actually required.

Click to place a block and a small algorithm builds a plausible seaside town around it, with no goal of any kind.

Drops you into a field recording from a forest somewhere on earth, tells you which forest, then offers you another.

Bridge, euchre, hearts and spades against bots or friends, on a table that behaves the way a real one does.

Same idea as typing but with notes rather than drums — write a paragraph, receive a surprisingly pretty melody.

Practise typing by working through actual novels, so the warm-up leaves you a few pages of Dostoevsky instead of nonsense.

Uno against bots or friends, with the draw-four arguments fully intact and no cards to lose under the sofa.

Ship positions and port arrivals on a fast, uncluttered map, ideal for watching a delivery of your own crawl across an ocean.

Infinite squared paper for sketching layouts and floor plans, with snapping and nothing else getting in the way.

City walking videos, driving tours and a guess-the-city game built on top of them, sorted by country for when you cannot travel.

Swap letters around a waffle-shaped grid to fix six words at once, with only fifteen swaps and stars for every one you save.

A live room of service-dog puppies in training, which is the single most reliable meeting-break on the internet.

Live webcams sorted by country and theme, from Alpine passes to Caribbean beach bars, with a great many pointed at completely empty roads.

Live safari drives broadcast twice a day from South African reserves, with guides answering viewer questions over the radio as they go.

Ten minutes out of somebody else's window somewhere in the world, filmed by them and left quietly running.

Crazy golf on a floating landscape that unfolds into a new course between shots. Worth playing for the transitions alone.

Over a hundred solitaire variants with proper undo, statistics and card backs from 2007. Still the most complete one going.

Recordings of very nearly every bird call on earth, uploaded by amateurs and searchable by species, country and even call type.

One expanding circle to breathe along with, adjustable to box breathing or 4-7-8, and nothing else on the page.

Old Faithful on a live feed, plus static cameras on the geyser basin and the north entrance, run by the National Park Service.

The Norwegian met office's forecast, famously accurate across Scandinavia and unusually calm about admitting uncertainty everywhere else.

A stubbornly plain German server hosting hundreds of turn-based Euro games, free and ad-free since long before that was a stance.

Newborn animals from zoos and aquariums worldwide, with their names, weights and the keepers' notes attached.