GOOD WEBSITES,
WORTH OPENING.
INTERESTING WEBSITES. USEFUL ONLINE TOOLS.
WE WENT LOOKING
FOR THE REST.
NOT EVERYTHING WORTH FINDING
IS OPTIMISED TO BE FOUND.
RANDOM FROM THE DIRECTORY
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OtherTabs is a hand-built directory of sites with an idea of their own: useful tools, strange experiments, generous archives, and things that could only exist in a browser.
We visit everything before it appears here. Some links may eventually be affiliate links, but only when we approve them and disclose them clearly on the page.
BROWSE THE COLLECTION / 44
Search by what you need, browse by type, or let us choose. Each entry includes a real screenshot, a practical summary and a full editorial review.
Radio Garden puts thousands of live stations on an interactive map. It is useful as a radio player, but the real appeal is being able to move from a familiar city to somewhere you know nothing about in seconds.
GOOD FORFinding music outside recommendation feeds / Background radio while working / Exploring places through local broadcasting
Same Energy is for the moment when you can recognise the image you need but cannot describe it. Start with a picture or a broad visual category, then move through related images by similarity rather than keywords.
GOOD FORBuilding moodboards / Finding visual references / Escaping literal keyword searches
WindowSwap shows submitted window views from homes around the world. The videos are deliberately uneventful: weather, traffic, birds, neighbours and the sound of a room continuing somewhere else.
GOOD FORQuiet second-screen ambience / A change of scene while working / Slow, unstructured browsing
The Public Domain Review is an editorial project devoted to unusual works from art, literature and the history of ideas. It combines careful essays with image collections drawn from material that is free of known copyright restrictions.
GOOD FORResearch rabbit holes / Historical image references / Finding stories outside the standard canon
Are.na lets you save images, links, files and text into channels that can remain private or connect with other people’s collections. It feels closer to a shared notebook or studio wall than a conventional social feed.
GOOD FORLong-running research projects / Shared references / Personal knowledge collections
Neal.fun is a growing collection of projects that explain an idea by letting you interact with it. Some are games, some are visual essays, and some are difficult to classify beyond “this belongs in a browser.”
GOOD FORInteractive storytelling references / Short browser diversions / Explaining scale and systems
Marginalia Search deliberately favours small, text-heavy and independent websites over the pages that dominate conventional search results. It is one of the clearest ways to look beyond the commercial web without relying on a random-site button.
GOOD FORFinding independent writing / Research beyond mainstream results / Exploring small websites
Wiby searches a deliberately compact index of lightweight pages that resemble the early personal web: hobby sites, essays, collections and small projects with little interest in growth hacking.
GOOD FOROld-fashioned personal pages / Low-bandwidth browsing / Unplanned web wandering
Cloudhiker maintains a large catalogue of unusual websites and turns it into a guided random walk. Categories and community ratings add enough structure to avoid the dead-link feeling of older random-web projects.
GOOD FORLow-effort discovery / Finding browser experiments / Escaping recommendation feeds
Earth Nullschool turns global forecast and observation datasets into a fluid, explorable globe. Wind becomes moving particles, while overlays reveal temperature, ocean currents, waves and atmospheric chemistry.
GOOD FORUnderstanding weather systems / Environmental visualisation references / Seeing conditions beyond forecasts
MapCrunch drops you into a random Google Street View location and removes the need to decide where to go first. Geographic filters can keep the journey within a country or region when completely random travel is too broad.
GOOD FORVirtual wandering / Location reference gathering / Geography games
Radiooooo presents recorded music as a map and timeline. Choose a country, select a decade and let the station move through tracks associated with that place and period.
GOOD FORHistorical music discovery / Building unfamiliar playlists / Exploring regional scenes
Patatap maps every letter key to a short sound and a full-screen animation. There is no setup, score or project file: press keys, find a rhythm and watch the visual system respond.
GOOD FORPlayful sound making / Motion-design inspiration / Short collaborative performances
Zoomquilt is a continuous journey through nested illustrated scenes. Artists contributed connected frames that dissolve into one another, creating the convincing impression of an image with no final depth.
GOOD FORAmbient visual loops / Collaborative-art references / Studying seamless transitions
Library of Babel turns Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional library into an algorithmic website. Every possible page made from its limited alphabet has a stable address, including every sentence you could search for and an overwhelming amount of nonsense.
GOOD FORConceptual rabbit holes / Thinking about information and authorship / Procedural-literature references
Internet Artifacts moves through network history using interfaces, files, clips and reconstructed moments rather than a conventional essay. The result feels closer to walking through a compact museum than reading a list of milestones.
GOOD FORInternet-history introductions / Interactive timeline references / Understanding interface change
The Pudding publishes reported stories built around data, interaction and original visual systems. Each piece chooses a format for its subject instead of forcing every story into the same article template.
GOOD FORData-storytelling references / Accessible cultural research / Studying editorial interaction
Nicky Case makes interactive explainers that turn abstract systems into small things you can play. Instead of illustrating an argument after the fact, the interaction itself becomes the explanation.
GOOD FORSystems-thinking introductions / Interactive education references / Curious short reads
Our World in Data combines explanatory writing with reusable charts and downloadable datasets on health, energy, population, inequality, technology and the environment.
GOOD FORChecking long-term trends / Downloading comparable datasets / Building evidence-based briefings
Project Gutenberg offers tens of thousands of ebooks that can be read online or downloaded in open formats. Its catalogue is strongest in older literature whose United States copyright has expired.
GOOD FORFinding public-domain texts / Offline reading / Building text corpora
Standard Ebooks takes public-domain texts and rebuilds them as consistent, proofread and typographically considered ebooks. Every title is also an open-source production project.
GOOD FORHigh-quality free ebooks / Typography references / Contributing to open publishing
Europeana brings together records from museums, galleries, libraries and archives across Europe. Search can move across objects, photographs, manuscripts, newspapers, sound and film without knowing which institution holds them.
GOOD FORCross-collection research / Historical visual references / Discovering smaller institutions
The Digital Public Library of America aggregates photographs, documents, books, maps and audiovisual records from libraries and archives across the United States.
GOOD FORUS historical research / Teaching with primary sources / Finding local archive material
Smithsonian Open Access makes millions of digital collection assets available under Creative Commons Zero, including images and data from art, science, history and culture collections.
GOOD FORReusable historical imagery / Creative remix projects / Museum-data research
Photopea handles PSD, XCF, Sketch, SVG and common image formats in a desktop-style editor. Layers, masks, selections, smart objects and export tools make it useful for serious edits when installed software is unavailable.
GOOD FOREditing PSD files quickly / Image work on shared computers / Converting layered design formats
Excalidraw makes diagrams from boxes, arrows, text and freehand marks without turning every thought into a polished presentation. Drawings can remain local, be saved as files or shared through collaboration sessions.
GOOD FORArchitecture sketches / Remote explanation / Early-stage diagrams
Squoosh compares an original image with compressed output in real time. Resize controls and multiple codecs make it easy to see exactly how much quality a smaller file is costing.
GOOD FORPreparing web images / Comparing modern formats / Learning compression trade-offs
Tiny Helpers collects small browser utilities for colour, accessibility, CSS, typography, performance, images and code. Most links solve one narrow task without requiring a large platform or account.
GOOD FORFrontend development / Design-production tasks / Replacing one-off searches
SVGOMG exposes SVGO’s optimisation controls beside a live preview. Paste markup or open a file, then remove editor metadata, simplify paths and reduce precision while watching for visible damage.
GOOD FORPreparing production icons / Inspecting SVG markup / Learning safe optimisation settings
A Soft Murmur lets you combine looping environmental sounds and control each volume independently. The result can mask distracting noise without demanding attention like music or speech.
GOOD FORMasking office noise / Reading and focused work / Creating a calmer room
Music For Programming is a numbered series of long mixes designed to sit behind focused work. The austere player avoids recommendations, comments and a constantly changing homepage.
GOOD FORSustained concentration / Finding ambient electronic mixes / Avoiding playlist maintenance
Stowaway turns aircraft and satellite tracking into a view from the ground or a virtual window seat. Select something overhead and follow its journey through a rendered sky and terrain, rather than reading positions on a conventional flight map.
GOOD FORVirtual flight watching / Identifying objects overhead / Exploring terrain from above
Energy Maps presents US residential and commercial energy costs as maps, historical charts and comparisons. Switch between electricity and natural gas, explore individual states and distinguish nominal prices from inflation-adjusted figures.
GOOD FORComparing state energy costs / Exploring historical price trends / Understanding household energy spending
Where the Shadow Fell maps solar eclipses from 2000 BCE to 3000 CE. Filter by eclipse type and period, inspect events around the globe, or switch to a grid that shows how eclipse families repeat over time.
GOOD FORExploring astronomy visually / Comparing eclipse types / Understanding eclipse cycles
ShadeMap combines a searchable map with date and time controls to visualise shadows from terrain, buildings and trees. It is a practical starting point for thinking about garden sunlight, outdoor seating or the light at a photography location.
GOOD FORGarden sunlight planning / Scouting photography locations / Understanding building and terrain shadows
Every Cube gives cube configurations a numerical address and lets you move through them with a slider or scroll wheel. Switch between a flat layout and a three-dimensional cube, or jump straight to patterns such as Checkerboard and Superflip.
GOOD FORVisualising permutations / Exploring cube patterns / Interactive maths curiosities
Celestial is a solar system you can alter: change gravity, follow a planet, add a body or remove one and watch the simulation respond. Camera, speed and scale controls help make orbital relationships easier to examine.
GOOD FORExploring orbital motion / Trying gravity experiments / Visual astronomy demonstrations
The Music Lab’s Tone-Deafness Test invites visitors to listen to sounds and answer questions as part of a citizen-science study. Its introduction explains the research, voluntary participation and the kinds of background questions involved.
GOOD FORLearning about auditory perception / Exploring music research / Voluntary citizen-science participation
RetroCast turns a local forecast into a sequence of old-style television weather screens. Current conditions, regional comparisons and forecasts rotate through a deliberately dated visual format, using present-day weather rather than archived broadcasts.
GOOD FORAmbient weather displays / Checking local conditions / Broadcast graphics inspiration
Xikipedia presents Simple English Wikipedia content as a social-style feed. Its locally running recommendation algorithm adapts to engagement, making it both a way to discover articles and a demonstration of how quickly a feed can narrow around your interests.
GOOD FORUnexpected reading topics / Understanding recommendation systems / Offline article browsing after loading
MyBreedMatch combines a breed questionnaire with a searchable dog database, side-by-side comparisons and ownership resources. It focuses on practical compatibility—energy, space, grooming and available time—rather than choosing a dog solely by appearance.
GOOD FORPreparing for dog ownership / Comparing breed characteristics / Thinking through care commitments
How Poor Am I? lets you choose a country and enter annual income or personal net wealth to explore your estimated position. Distribution charts, country comparisons and source notes put the result alongside the broader concentration of wealth.
GOOD FORUnderstanding inequality / Comparing income and wealth / Exploring country-level distributions
Screen Toys collects Gavin Shapiro’s interactive experiments, including a wood-splitting simulation, a sliding puzzle and a chaotic reinterpretation of chess. Other entries lead to animated visualisers that can accompany music or fill a second screen.
GOOD FORShort browser diversions / Playful interaction references / Music-friendly background visuals
S80 repeatedly requests selected web endpoints and plots their response times, alongside minimum, maximum and average measurements. It offers a quick way to observe latency variation across destinations without opening a terminal.
GOOD FORSpotting intermittent latency / Comparing web endpoints / Learning what browser timing measures