Safe at your desk

The percentage that launched a thousand arguments — the share of critics who were positive, which is not an average score.

Three colour fields flipping between red, green and blue as you move, a fixture of the useless-web canon and a strobe risk.

Run through a tunnel in space where the walls become the floor whenever you turn. An entire generation played this instead of maths.

Tells you the best three minutes to leave for the toilet during any film, and summarises exactly what you missed. Absurd, and it works.

The Cube Escape series in full and free — bleak Dutch point-and-click rooms with a lake, a lot of birds and a plot you assemble sideways.

Archive of notable animation cuts, tagged by the individual animator who drew them. Studying the craft one sequence at a time.

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

A falling-sand game with several hundred materials that all react properly, including a dozen ways to end the world by mistake.

Falling-sand physics with fire, water, plants and lava, plus a public gallery of what everybody else set alight.

Tetris where the blocks collapse into falling sand, so a line only clears when one colour touches both walls. Fiendish and lovely.

Daily gag strips about science, philosophy and human awfulness, each hiding an extra panel behind the red button.

Reverse image search tuned for illustration: hand it a cropped screenshot and it names the artist and the original post.

Conservation campaign for a cephalopod that lives in trees, used for over twenty years to teach children about checking sources.

Drag one slider from quantum foam to the cosmic web, with every object in between labelled at its true size.

Find one to twenty-five scattered across a grid, in order, against the clock. The standard peripheral-vision and attention drill.

Collaborative fiction dressed as containment paperwork for anomalous objects, written by thousands of people in one clinical deadpan.

Rough sketch in, finished image out, with the result following your actual lines rather than politely ignoring them.

Converts your scrolling into real distance and tells you what you have just passed — a giraffe, the Eiffel Tower, low Earth orbit.

Indexes only independent personal websites whose owners submitted them. No content farms, because there is nothing there to farm.

You are a colony ship AI choosing which disasters to absorb, and every run ends with a summary of how badly humanity settled.

Brown University's visual introduction to probability and statistics, one animated chapter per concept.

The original semantic-distance guessing game, noticeably harder than its descendants and considerably more humbling.

Word association against a machine: type anything semantically close to the target and the block clears. Tetris rules, meaning as the mechanic.

Raw Sentinel and Landsat imagery for anywhere on the planet, free, with band combinations that reveal crops, floods and old burn scars.

Recipes that explain the science first and then tell you what to do. The food-lab pieces are why it has the reputation it has.

Short visual explanations of statistics ideas — eigenvectors, conditional probability, Markov chains — all draggable.

Thousands of full-screen graphics experiments, each one a few hundred lines of maths you can read and edit live.

Drag the control points of a letter back into shape. Your score is how far off the real typeface you landed.

Random design briefs with a countdown attached, for when the problem is not skill but having nothing to work on.

A first-person shooter in which every player is an egg and every hit is messy. Considerably better than that premise deserves.

A full year of merchant shipping movements animated on one dark globe and split by cargo type, which turns global trade into a visible swarm.

Search engine for internet-connected devices rather than pages: webcams, routers and industrial kit nobody meant to publish.

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

Ragdoll obstacle course whose entire design goal is taking your stickman apart in an inventive new way each level.

A live feed of OpenStreetMap edits as they happen, zooming to each contributor's patch of the world one small correction at a time.

Doom compiled to WebAssembly and running at full speed in a tab, which is either nostalgia or a small engineering miracle.

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

A no-frills portal unusually strong on two-player games you can play on one keyboard with somebody sitting next to you.

A persistent economic simulation where thousands of players genuinely supply each other, so prices move for real reasons.

Forty logic puzzles on one page, each generated fresh and each solvable by pure reasoning. The interface is ancient and it does not matter.

Enter any two articles and get every shortest path of links between them, drawn as a graph you can drag.

An infinite canvas for rough diagrams and flows. Opens instantly with nothing to configure and no file to save first.

A better-drawn take on the guess-the-doodle format, with more brushes, custom word lists and rooms that hold a large group.

Full paint program in a tab — brushes, layers, filters and a stamp library — with nothing to install and nothing to pay.

Draw the word, guess everyone else's, share one link with the group. The default browser party game, and deservedly so.

The world's largest supplier of real and replica skulls, browsable by species, which is educational and mildly alarming in equal parts.

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.

The seat-pocket catalogue survived the airline it came with and moved online, still selling garden yetis to a captive audience.