🌀 Mesmerising

Fly out through a mapped model of our stellar neighbourhood until the Sun is one unremarkable dot among thousands.

The original tile-merging game, written in a weekend and responsible for an enormous amount of lost 2014.

Grant Sanderson's maths lessons, plus the written versions of the animations that made linear algebra look like geometry.

Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.

Waterhole cameras in southern African reserves, running since the nineties, where nothing happens for an hour and then everything does.

Live flight tracking with airport arrival boards and playback of earlier flights, formerly known as RadarBox and still free to browse.

The lab page of the psychologist whose completely static images refuse to stop rotating, added to for over twenty years.

Every knot worth knowing, animated frame by frame so you can scrub back and forth until your hands finally get it.

Every opening and ending sequence in decent quality, searchable by series or by song. A dangerous tab to open at work.

The prestige-layer masterpiece: reset everything for a multiplier, then reset the resets, until the numbers stop having names.

Botanical infinite zoom drifting through flowers, insects and quiet ruins. Best left running on a second screen.

Streams clips uploaded straight from phones with default filenames and no audience, drifting past like a broadcast from nobody.

Annual contest in which vision scientists compete to fool you, with every finalist since 2005 still watchable.

Sculpt a glossy blob with sliders for noise, light and iridescence, then leave it rotating and admire your handiwork.

Ben Eater's flocking simulation with the three rules exposed as sliders, so you can break the flock deliberately.

The screensaver logo in full screen, with a counter for how many times it has hit the corner while you waited.

Brown bears standing in an Alaskan waterfall catching salmon in mid-air, live from Katmai, and the reason Fat Bear Week exists.

A history map with a timeline slider, layered with rulers, religions, battles and linked encyclopedia articles.

Open-city driving with traffic and no mission attached, for when you want to obey a speed limit in peace.

Video walks through a real city, and your job is to work out which one from the shopfronts, number plates and pedestrians.

Click monsters, hire heroes to click for you, then ascend for souls. The clicker that dragged the whole genre onto Steam.

Interactive models of what complexity science likes best — epidemics, flocking, synchronisation, forest fires.

Home of Conway's Game of Life — pattern archive, wiki and a board for setting your own cells running.

Click the cookie, buy grandmas, buy portals, accidentally summon something. The game that turned incrementals into a genre.

One button, one endless right angle, one car sliding off the edge of the world. The purest possible drifting game.

Tune a car, hold the handbrake and score points for angle rather than lap times. The garage is quietly the actual game.

JavaScript demos in 140 characters. The gap between how little code there is and what appears is the whole appeal.

A rotating globe with every wind current on Earth drawn as moving lines, and layers underneath for ocean currents, particulates and the jet stream.

Thousands of public webcams pointed at squares, harbours, volcanoes and building sites, some with archives stretching back decades.

Interactive classroom illusions you can drag, toggle and pause, which makes the effects considerably harder to dismiss.

A scatterplot of six thousand music genres you have never heard of, each one clickable for a sample and a list of its bands.

Idle evolution from primordial soup to interstellar empire, with dozens of species branches and an enormous technology tree.

Point-and-click cabinet of grotesque curiosities where every drawer you open contains a small, beautifully animated unpleasantness.

NASA's real-time 3D model of every mission in flight, letting you ride along with a probe on its actual trajectory.

Three infinite layers of colour falling forever over a low drone, from the net artist behind half the web's cult toys.

A fidget spinner you flick with the mouse, with physics good enough that people leave it running in a spare tab.

A toy about synchronisation — a few hundred blinking dots that agree on a rhythm with no conductor anywhere.

Aircraft moving across a live map with routes, altitudes and speeds. Startling once you notice how much is up there at once.

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.

Paint with thick wet oils that pile up, smear and catch the light exactly like the real thing, entirely in a browser tab.

Conway's cellular automaton with a library of known patterns, still the clearest demonstration that rules alone make worlds.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

An interactive world atlas you can scrub year by year from 3000 BC, watching every border redraw itself.

A genetic algorithm evolves two-dimensional cars across rough terrain while you watch generations fail forward.

A free flight simulator in the browser using satellite terrain for the entire planet, with real air traffic overhead.

Full-disc satellite imagery of the Americas straight from the GOES satellites, refreshed every few minutes at absurd resolution.

Drive a golf ball absurd distances, upgrade the swing, repeat until the ball is leaving the atmosphere entirely.

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