Instant

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

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.

Grow a snake on glowing pellets and cut other players off so they burst into more of them. The .io boom started here.

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

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

The original rumour desk, still patiently establishing whether the thing your uncle forwarded actually happened.

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

The original film's promotional site, left online untouched for nearly thirty years and preserved when the sequel arrived.

Wiggle the mouse and a black worm follows; wiggle harder and it strobes violently, so treat the epilepsy warning seriously.

Ask a sports question in plain English and get the actual numbers back with a chart. Ends pub arguments in about four seconds.

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

The other GIF keyboard, with better tagging for reaction clips and a sticker library your phone already quietly uses.

One click copies the Lenny face, the shrug or the look of disapproval to your clipboard, correctly escaped.

Type a word, pick from several hundred FIGlet fonts, and get the enormous ASCII banner your terminal deserves.

An air horn in a browser tab, installable offline, built by Google engineers as a demo and adopted as a weapon.

One button, escalating nonsense, and no way onward except pressing it again. Works on a phone, which is the danger.

The original page describing the World Wide Web project, restored by CERN at its first address. Plain text and a few links.

One of the first things the internet ever collectively lost its mind over, and it is still rows of dancing rodents and one loop.

Two Google search terms, one question: which one gets searched more? Your instincts are far worse than you think they are.

Drag countries across the Mercator projection and watch Greenland shrink to its actual size. Settles the argument in about ten seconds.

Flick the switch on. A small hand reaches out and turns it off again. That is the entire website and it is somehow enough.

One button, one random pointless website, no explanation offered or needed. The site that turned this whole genre into a genre.

Live positions and finder charts for planets, comets and asteroids, updated continuously and free of clutter.

One photorealistic portrait of somebody who has never existed, regenerated on every refresh. The page that started the whole genre.

Invented dictionary entries complete with etymology and a usage example, none of them real words. Several of them deserve to be.

Reverse image search that finds the oldest copy of a picture rather than visually similar ones. The tool for tracing where a photo began.

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs, get them back visibly identical and roughly seventy per cent smaller. Twenty files at a time, free.

Reddit's fact firehose, where each post is one verified surprise with the source link attached underneath.

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

Paste a single screenshot and it names the anime, the episode and the exact timestamp. Unreasonably accurate for something free.

The big one: broadcast radio, sport and podcasts from most of the world, free with adverts and no account needed to listen.

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

Type words and each letter becomes a drum hit, so your own name comes out as a loop you will struggle to stop playing.

Flips your sentence using Unicode lookalikes, so it survives a paste into anywhere that accepts plain text.

Every earthquake recorded anywhere in the last thirty days, sized by magnitude and clickable all the way down to the seismograph traces.

Weather models rendered beautifully enough to watch for their own sake, with layers for wind, rain, snow depth and wave height.

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

Wildfire incidents across the western United States, mapped and annotated in near real time by volunteers who sit listening to fire radio.

Forecasts built on a network of tens of thousands of amateur weather stations, so the reading is often from somebody on your actual street.

Winamp itself, reimplemented faithfully enough that the equaliser works. It really whips the llama's behind, in a browser tab.

Full-resolution images from the James Webb telescope, with the explanations of what you are actually looking at.

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

Eighty live webcam effects, most of them terrible, all of them fun for exactly the ninety seconds required.

Drag through a full-screen fluid that swirls and bleeds colour behind the cursor, at full frame rate even on a phone.

The planet chopped into three-metre squares, each given a three-word name, which is either brilliant or a licensing trap depending who you ask.

The space station's position, ground track and next passes over you, with an orbital countdown that is oddly hard to stop watching.

Search engine that indexes hand-made pages only, surfacing the small quiet web the big engines stopped showing you years ago.

One click, one random Wikipedia article, repeated until the afternoon has quietly gone somewhere else.