10 sites we lost

One button, one Darth Vader scream, one domain with a comical number of Os in it. It was the canonical example of a website that does exactly one thing, and it was on every list of pointless sites for the better part of a decade.

Let you build a convincing fake Windows dialog box, complete with the right icon and button set, then save it as an image. A staple of office pranks and of anyone who needed a screenshot of an error that did not exist.

A room of clickable objects that played sounds technology has since retired: dial-up handshake, Nokia ringtone, the whirr of a floppy drive, a Tamagotchi. Brendan Chilcutt built it in 2012 as an argument that sound design deserves preservation too.

One of the two great free-hosting services of the personal-homepage era, alongside GeoCities. Millions of hand-written pages with tiled backgrounds and under-construction GIFs lived here, and the whole estate is now only reachable through archives.

Rain, thunder and a fireplace on independent sliders, years before that became a genre of app. It was the reference point most later ambient mixers were measured against.

Meta's browser demo for its image-segmentation model. You uploaded a photo, clicked any object, and it cut that object out cleanly — one of the clearest hands-on explanations of what a vision model actually does.

Turned a rough mouse sketch into a finished image while you watched, and was the easiest way to show somebody what image models did without an account or a prompt-writing lesson. The domain now redirects to an unrelated site that has nothing to do with it.

A to-scale scroll through the solar system that put the real distances in, so most of the page was deliberately empty. The domain now belongs to a printing company.

A stacked area chart of what the world listened to from 1950 onwards, built from Google Play Music libraries, where you could click into any genre and watch it swell and collapse. Google retired the visualisation along with the service it was built on.

Served a track at random from the millions on Spotify with a play count of exactly zero, giving a recording its first ever listen. The page still loads, but its Spotify credentials are no longer configured, so the player returns a setup error instead of music.