Tab games: free games you can play in a browser tab

What counts as a tab game

A tab game is a game that lives in a browser tab. There is nothing to install and nothing to update: you open a link, play, and close the tab when you are done. The best-known one is already on most computers. When Chrome has no internet connection it shows a pixel dinosaur, and pressing Space starts an endless runner; you can open it on purpose by typing chrome://dino in the address bar. Microsoft Edge has its own, a surfing game in the style of the old SkiFree, at edge://surf.

Those two are fun for a minute. A tab game site does the same thing on purpose and at more length: each game is a web page built with HTML5 or WebGL, small enough to load in a second or two, and written to remember your progress in the browser so that a closed tab is not a lost game.

Why play in a tab instead of an app

An app has to earn a place on your phone: a store page, a download of tens or hundreds of megabytes, permissions, updates and notifications. A tab game asks for none of that. Most TabSpawn games download under 300 KB before the first move, less than one photo from a phone camera, they need no account, and they leave nothing behind but a little saved progress. On a school or office Chromebook, where installing is often blocked, a browser tab is the only place a game can go anyway.

The trade-off is that a tab can be closed by accident, and the browser may unload a tab in the background when it is short of memory. That is why the games here save as they go: a finished puzzle level, a best score or a Bowfall campaign is written to the browser's storage when it changes, not when you quit.

Seven tab games to try

• Stackrise: one tap drops a sliding block and the overhang falls away; a run lasts a minute or two. The purest tab game here.
• Outline: pull arrow lines out of a picture in the right order, with three drops of room for error per level.
• Huesort: pour colours between tubes until each holds one colour; sixty levels, saved one by one.
• Inkgrid: nonogram picture puzzles from 5x5 sketches to 15x15 murals, all solvable by logic alone.
• Cosmojar: a Suika-style merge game with planets; a jar lasts until it overflows.
• Bowfall: ragdoll archers with a thirty-level campaign across six worlds.
• Jetbrawl: a jetpack deathmatch for up to eight players; a match ends at five minutes or twenty kills.

Keeping a game in a tab

• Pin the tab (right-click it, then Pin) so the game stays open, small, at the left of the tab bar.
• Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab move between tabs on Windows, Linux and ChromeOS; on a Mac, Control+Tab or Command+Option with the left and right arrows.
• On a phone, open the browser menu and add the game to your home screen; it opens like an app but is still the same web page.
• Silence a noisy tab from its tab menu, or use the game's own sound button.
• Most games pause when their tab is in the background, because browsers stop drawing hidden tabs. Online matches such as Jetbrawl carry on without you.

Are tab games safe?

A game in a tab has the same limits as any other web page: it cannot read your files, see your other tabs or install anything. What it can do is keep a little data in the browser, which is how progress and your Top 10 player name are stored. Clearing the site's data in your browser settings removes it, and a private window starts fresh every time.

Questions