Modern and classic screensavers, in your browser

Screensavers were invented to stop static images burning into old CRT and plasma displays. Modern LCD and OLED panels rarely need that protection, so the screensaver survives for the reason people actually loved it: it turns an idle screen into a tiny piece of moving art.

This gallery is two collections in one. The classics are here — flying toasters, Matrix rain, the bouncing DVD logo, starfields and mazes — rebuilt from scratch rather than emulated. Alongside them sit hundreds of modern savers that read live from free public data: earthquakes as they are recorded, aircraft overhead, river levels, market moves, what a research repository published this morning. Those are marked LIVE in the list below, and what they show is real, not a simulation.

Everything runs in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript on any modern browser, with nothing to install. Open one, adjust its colours and speed, and your choices are remembered for next time. Filter the list below by name or category, or narrow it to the live-data ones. Each screensaver also has its own page explaining how the effect is drawn — and, where it uses live data, exactly which source it reads and how often.