Time you have
Instant
No setup, no reading, no learning curve. These pay off before you have decided whether you like them.
262 sites · page 2 of 6
Sugar-coated filler text for wireframes, with sliders for exactly how sweet and how long the nonsense should be.
- <1 min
Several hundred cipher, code and puzzle solvers in one place, from Caesar shifts to crossword pattern matching.
- <1 min
Mix rain, keyboards, seagulls and a fireplace into one soundscape, then hand the whole mix to somebody as a single link.
- <1 min
- Sound on
A graphing calculator good enough that people make art with it — type a function and drag its parameters about.
- <1 min
An avatar library where you can dial through a dozen illustration styles and copy the result straight out as an image.
- <1 min
A tank shooting polygons for experience, then branching down a surprisingly deep upgrade tree, from the maker of Agar.io.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Paste two blocks of text and get a colour-coded diff back immediately. Also handles PDFs, images and spreadsheets.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Runs a standard or extended check to reveal which servers actually saw your DNS lookups. The quickest way to catch a VPN not doing its job.
- <1 min
Crowdsourced content warnings covering a hundred-odd specific triggers, so you can check beforehand rather than find out during.
- <1 min
Paste a website address and learn whether it is down for the whole world or only for you. Settles the argument with your router in seconds.
- <1 min
Move the mouse and flowers, mushrooms and grass sprout underneath it while a music box plays. No tools, no undo, no point.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Dashcam footage of a city loop with the local radio playing over it, so you can drive slowly through Istanbul while answering email.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Search without the profile building, plus bang shortcuts that fire your query straight at another site. Type an exclamation and w for Wikipedia.
- <1 min
A rotating globe with every wind current on Earth drawn as moving lines, and layers underneath for ocean currents, particulates and the jet stream.
- <1 min
Thousands of public webcams pointed at squares, harbours, volcanoes and building sites, some with archives stretching back decades.
- <1 min
Drag left and right to slap a man in the face with an eel, at whatever speed the day seems to call for.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The carbon intensity of the grid across most of the world, coloured by how clean each country's electricity happens to be at this minute.
- <1 min
One sincere, specific compliment per click, written by people rather than generated. For days that have not gone well.
- <1 min
Every Google emoji mashup, searchable — pick two and get the official illustrated hybrid back as a PNG.
- <1 min
Search, click, paste, with nothing else on the page competing for attention, which is precisely the point.
- <1 min
Two emoji in, one hybrid out, with a randomiser for when you cannot decide which pairing to ruin next.
- <1 min
An ASCII horse whose legs continue for as long as you are willing to keep scrolling, which is longer than you think.
Slide across a stack of time zones and see the hour for everyone at once. The quickest way to find a meeting slot that spans continents.
- <1 min
Paste a terrifying shell command and it pulls the whole thing apart, annotating every flag from the relevant man page.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The largest collection of live nature cams anywhere: bear falls, puppy rooms, osprey nests and coral reefs, all free and always running.
Full-screen fake update screens for every operating system, including the blue one, with a bar that never finishes.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Three infinite layers of colour falling forever over a low drone, from the net artist behind half the web's cult toys.
- <1 min
- Sound on
An internet speed test that starts the moment the page opens and shows one big number. Tap for upload speed and latency if you want more.
- <1 min
A fidget spinner you flick with the mouse, with physics good enough that people leave it running in a spare tab.
- <1 min
Searches the web for actual sound files by keyword, in a layout untouched since roughly 2003. Still the fastest route to a duck quack.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
The pipe game its own creator pulled from the app stores for being too addictive, rebuilt and still ruining afternoons.
- <1 min
Every aircraft in the sky right now on one map. Click any of them for the route, the aircraft type and how far it still has to go.
A browser home screen with a clock, timer, lofi and a to-do list, arranged to look calmer than your actual desktop.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Paint with thick wet oils that pile up, smear and catch the light exactly like the real thing, entirely in a browser tab.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Suggests font pairings from a model trained on type, with locks so you can hold one face and reroll the other.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Plays tracks that nobody has ever streamed, not once. The play counter is the whole point, and the music is exactly as advertised.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Native speakers pronouncing individual words in hundreds of languages, for when a phonetic spelling is not enough.
- <1 min
- Sound on
A grid of small games and nothing else — no descriptions, no ratings, no explanation, exactly as it was in 2010.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Conway's cellular automaton with a library of known patterns, still the clearest demonstration that rules alone make worlds.
- <1 min
- Desktop
A large casual portal aimed squarely at people who want a match-three game and no further conversation about it.
- <1 min
Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.
- <1 min
The GIF search engine everything else plugs into, still the fastest route to the exact reaction you have in mind.
- <1 min
Full-disc satellite imagery of the Americas straight from the GOES satellites, refreshed every few minutes at absurd resolution.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Chart how often a phrase appears in books since 1500, which settles a surprising number of arguments outright.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Small library of ready-made gradients you nudge by dragging the angle, then copy straight into a stylesheet.
- <1 min
Draw a horse, then watch it gallop off to join the herd of terrible horses drawn by everybody else.
- <1 min
Mash any keys and perfectly formatted code appears character by character, exactly as in every hacking scene ever filmed.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Mr Doob's sketching toy, where strokes web themselves together with connecting threads and turn scribbles into shading.
- <1 min
- Desktop
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Instant: questions
How many sites are in the instant list?
262 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 4 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
262 of the 262 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
181 of 262 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 262 are safe for work and 214 work with the sound off.