Coffee break

The game that made the genre: dropped into Street View, guess where on the globe you are. The free tier is thin these days.

Rhythm platformer in which a cube jumps in time with the music, and every death teaches you exactly one frame of timing.

A community-built geography quiz mixing street view, flags and country outlines, with private lobbies for a group of you.

Climb a mountain of junk using nothing but a hammer, and lose an hour of progress to a single bad swing.

Industrial fishing vessel tracks worldwide, rebuilt from satellite signals, showing exactly where the world's fleets have been working.

Satellite-derived tree cover loss for anywhere on Earth, week by week, with alerts you can zoom in on until you are looking at one hillside.

Red-carpet criticism written with real fashion knowledge and jokes aimed at the outfit rather than the person in it.

Good news with a nudge attached — every story arrives alongside something you could actually do about it.

Positive news published daily since 1997, back when the idea sounded like a joke rather than a business model.

Gigapixel scans from two thousand museums, plus the experiments that let you find your own face in a painting.

The whole planet in 3D in a browser tab, with guided Voyager tours for when you would rather be told where to look than choose.

Plots how often a phrase appears across books printed since 1500. Watch a word arrive, peak, and quietly fall out of use.

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

Comic-strip teardowns of real product decisions, each one explaining the psychology behind why it did or did not work.

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

The official register of the longest, fastest and most improbable things people have done entirely on purpose.

Ragdoll obstacle courses in which the dad on the bicycle loses limbs to almost anything he touches, across millions of user levels.

Seventeen million scanned volumes from research libraries, with full-text search running across the entire lot.

The cult's own website, left exactly as it was in 1997 and still quietly maintained. A sobering artefact rather than a joke.

A superhero character creator with a costume parts library deep enough to have outlasted three separate web technologies.

Old photographs pinned to the exact street corner where they were taken, fading into the modern view behind.

The lolcat archive that taught the internet its first grammar, still posting captioned animals two decades later.

Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.

Several hundred psychological tests, from serious personality inventories to deeply unserious ones, all free and all instant.

A map of the solar system drawn to true scale, meaning most of your scrolling is spent crossing absolutely nothing.

Catalogue, reviews and play links for four decades of interactive fiction, maintained by people who take the form extremely seriously.

Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.

A philosophy department's catalogue of illusions, each with what it is, what it demonstrates, and the argument still going about it.

Catalogue of impossible figures, ambiguous objects and Escher-adjacent architecture, kept up by one very devoted collector.

A calendar of every conjunction, eclipse and meteor shower coming up, with charts drawn for your own location.

Dress beatboxers in different outfits and each one adds a loop, building a full a cappella track by drag and drop.

Classic Mac OS booting instantly in a browser, with the software of the period already installed and ready to open.

David McCandless's poster-grade infographics on everything from relative drug harms to the meanings of colours.

Archived research papers, including preprints and journals that have since folded, kept readable rather than merely cited.

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

A stock market simulator with real prices and imaginary money, which is very much the correct order to learn that in.

Faithful browser rebuild of the Roland TR-808, down to the orange buttons and the cowbell nobody can leave alone.

Point it at any classic story file and it runs in the tab, which makes the whole Infocom era playable without installing an interpreter.

A marketplace of language tutors giving one-to-one video lessons at wildly varying prices and standards.

The party packs everybody streams: one screen shared with the room, everybody else playing from their own phone browser.

Cleaner and more factual than its rivals, strongest on geography and history, and mercifully free of which-character quizzes.

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.

Home of BombParty, where a bomb passes round the room and you type a word containing the given letters before it goes off.

The DOSBox emulator compiled for the browser, and the machinery most of the other DOS-in-a-tab projects are built on.

Bare-bones stacking practice with sprint, cheese race and replays, used by people who take block placement very seriously.

Straightforward celebrity photo blogging updated hourly, with none of the editorialising the rest of the genre insists on.

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