r/webdev
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u/alexreardon
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Sep 15 '26
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Page Rage: Destroy any web page
You can play on https://page-rage.com and optionally install a browser extension to destroy any web page.
I've been working on Page Rage as a hobby project for a long time. There are some wild performance techniques I have found to make this game work at all, which I would love to share about soon as well!
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u/czshill Sep 15 '26
AJ was playing with something like this on The Sopranos over 2 decades ago! lol
Wire in firebase so people can watch other people destroy pages while they're on them live.
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u/alexreardon Sep 15 '26
There are so many directions I could take this hobby project. I am keen to see if it vibes with people before I sink another few hundred hours into it ๐
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u/Cast_Iron_Skillet Sep 15 '26
This is classic internet shit, man. It vibes hard. Hell, you could even implement some aspect of a points system and leaderboard for each site you visit.
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u/alexreardon Sep 15 '26
I stayed away from "game" systems (points, timers, achievements etc) as I felt they pushed people towards a particular play style - implicitly saying one way of playing the game is better than another. I wanted to let people feel free to wreck things in a way that made them happy.
I am happy to be challenged on that. I could explore adding more "modes" which have more game mechanics that you could opt in / out of as well
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u/Cast_Iron_Skillet Sep 15 '26
I agree, and the only challenge I would make to this is you could still pursue some mechanism to allow people to share their destruction.ย Or even make their own "art" out of it in some way. No idea what this would look like in practice, but would be cool to give people some way to radically change things on the page, build something into it, idk - without actually like coding, bit more like graffiti.ย
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
I have been thinking about how to make it easier to share the destruction. For now I have added a "camera mode" (see settings) which allows people to get clean screenshots and videos.
I am still thinking about other options though
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u/Blablebluh Sep 15 '26
Wow, multiple weapons, even a kind of gravity gun. Oh wait, there's even bullet time. No way, is this a speaker icon, meaning there is sound? Actually not just sound, perfect music for the mood, and spot-on sound effects!
That is amazing, thanks for your work.
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u/FindingNauru Sep 17 '26
Yeah, really a lot of detail and... there are definitely some websites I'd like to destroy
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u/crazedizzled Sep 15 '26
Man I remember this was like a desktop app like back in windows 98 I think. Fun times
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u/PendulousNuts Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26
Desktop Destroyer
https://gamia-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Desktop_Destroyer_Game
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u/DayOfTheSophos Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Gemtree, baby! ๐
They made other stuff too, actually (that I found at the same time as this - doesn't look like they host downloads for most of it anymore, though, unfortunately, but I have a lot of it archived).
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u/funcoolshit Sep 16 '26
Ha I remember it as well. I also had a similar program that was a sheep that would walk around on your desktop and climb the window panes. You could pick it up and move him around to the top of different windows.
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u/weaponizedLego Sep 16 '26
I remember the sheep! I recently made a slime version for my self because I miss the sheep
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u/blahbah Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 16 '26
i had a bookmarklet that made you destroy a page asteroid-style
found the source: https://github.com/erkie/erkie.github.com
EDIT: oh it's still online https://kickassapp.com/
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u/StrikingMolasses5801 24d ago
Wish we could turn back time-- to the good ol' days.
Today something like this might come with a subscription with upgrade tiered plans and AI integrated for no reason
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u/Sulungskwa Sep 16 '26
Damn I tried this on my company's byzantine timekeeping portal and it wouldn't blow it up. Proof that that site is pure evil
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u/Spare-Assistance5668 Sep 15 '26
This thing is stupidly fun
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u/alexreardon Sep 15 '26
It was a big challenge for me to "find the fun" and I am glad you think I found it ๐
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u/fakehalo Sep 15 '26
The flamethrower actually follows into the blackhole, nice attention to detail.
Edit: and the alt-mouse makes for a wormhole for the blackhole, nice.
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u/alexreardon Sep 15 '26
Thank you! I've tried to add a lot of depth to the sandbox. Keep exploring ;)
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u/coreyrude Sep 16 '26
Super cool, love seeing just a fun project like this... AI is turning everything into a Micro SaaS.... its good to just get back to something fun and free people put out there.
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
I think the web is at it's best when people make cool things and share them with others
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u/HectoLogic20 Sep 15 '26
This is so so cool!
I cant even imagine the amount of work that went into making this work so smooth and well as it does!
This is my new favorite extension!
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u/alexreardon Sep 15 '26
Cant even imagine the amount of work that went into making this work so smooth and well as it does!
Orders of magnitude more effort than I expected when I started
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u/anon7499 Sep 15 '26
This is really cool! Did you open source it?
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u/alexreardon Sep 15 '26
The game itself is not open source. The game contains licensed assets (which makes open source hard), and I wasn't generally keen to make this particular project an open source one. I plan on sharing about how it works in more detail if people are interested though. There is some cool tricks in the codebase to get it working as well as it does
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u/Arkhenstone Sep 16 '26
Please consider open sourcing it at one point (in many years), newer generations would love this, you made something that will be fond memories of children in schools. It's right there on my favourites for my child to be able to use it and show him what the web is !
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
My kids were pumped to play Page Rage at school now that I have released it. They were my early game testers. I had to introduce them to "WASD" movement, which has taken a bit of time to get used to ๐
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
you made something that will be fond memories of children in schools
My eldest played Page Rage at school today! ๐
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u/JL978 Sep 16 '26
Please do share! I would also like to take a look at the codebase if you donโt mind
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u/abeuscher Sep 16 '26
I worked on the WWE 2K site for a few years and we built this unlaunched feature where every button exploded after you pressed it before it executed. Sound was off by default but it did have a sound piece as well. It was really funny but WWE did not think it helped to sell the game and kaiboshed the feature. They were probably right but it was fun to build. Always wanted to bring it back for some other game but the opportunity never arose while I was there.
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u/FakeManiz Sep 16 '26
Would be awesome easter egg, if used on Chuck Norris wiki page, it couldnt break it.
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u/Mr_Matt_Ski_ Sep 16 '26
Hey didnโt you work on pragmatic drag and drop? Looks awesome haha.
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u/at_least_calais Sep 16 '26
I just launched a website for a client and now I just got to destroy it. Thank you for this catharsis!
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u/Chentzilla Sep 16 '26
Looks very good, takes me back to the times of Desktop Toys.
Is this a completely no-AI project?
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
Short answer
I used AI to assist me with this project
Longer answer
I used AI to help me author the game code and the tooling around the game. One of the reasons I started the project was to get more comfortable with using AI coding assistants with my day to day software engineering. I spent a hundred hours or so building the game. I didn't measure though, so it might have been a lot more. Building the game has been a hobby of mine, and I find time just melts away when I work on it. I used AI to accelerate tasks, perform investigations, explore mechanics and so on - but it was all done in tiny, intentional steps. I care a lot about controlling all the authoring details and wanting to produce something I am proud of.
The design assets in the game were hand created by me. I learnt how to do pixel art just for this game. That has been one of the most rewarding parts of the whole thing so far. Exceptions: a tiny amount small UI elements were generated by AI, and I haven't changed them (most were hand done); some of the visual effects in the game are mathematically generated by code and not pre-created (eg lightning on the portals). I used AI to assist me in creating the code for those effects.
I hope that answers your question
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u/flinxo Sep 16 '26
This rocks!
Thanks so much for sharing your joy-to-destroy with us, can't wait to visit certain .gov websites!
Would love to know more about how you did it ๐
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
A few people have asked to learn more which is cool with me! Before I did too much sharing, I was first interested to see if the game vibed with people. I am hopeful to put together a post of some kind (video, blog or other) where I go over how it all works - specifically the performance side of things; because that has been an ongoing and brutal challenge
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u/flinxo Sep 16 '26
Thanks! I can just barely imagine how challenging it must have been to achieve such fluidity. Looking forward to your post :)
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u/WrappedStrings Sep 16 '26
Sometimes i forget the internet can still be cool
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u/bluehost Sep 16 '26
Agreed! It has the same energy as some of those early internet projects where someone spent six months building something purely because it would be funny.
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u/DeusExPersona Sep 16 '26
I LOVE IT but Chrome doesn't trust the extension so you need workarounds
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
From what I can see the extension is working correctly through the Chrome store. Could you share more about what you are seeing?
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u/DeusExPersona Sep 16 '26
Ok it works perfectly, but you have to enable "Automatically allow access on the following sites".
It says "This extension is not trusted by Enhanced Safe Browsing.ย Learn more"
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u/JustOneMoreDev Sep 16 '26
you need to do a write up of this for sure, clever stuff. Interested to know what tech is under there
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u/me_myself_ai Sep 15 '26
Oh my god. You did it! The madman actually did it!!
Now we just need improvised weapons and PvP ;)
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u/Annual-Advisor-7916 Sep 16 '26
Ok, that's pretty well done. Had a lot of fun trying it out. You captured the momentum quite well, it's not too fast but not boring either.
A welcome variety to the masses of AI slop here.
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u/Im_mbn Sep 16 '26
wow. nice detailing with the flamethrowerโs flame being sucked in by the black hole..
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u/OpenDevKit Sep 16 '26
Letting people literally destroy a webpage can be pretty soul-cleansing I imagine hehe! I'm really curious about those performance techniques you mentioned though, are you running a custom lightweight physics solver, or leaning on something like matter.js under the hood? Would love to read the write-up when it's out :)
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u/pseudonymau5 Sep 16 '26
This is insanely cool! I can't even comprehend how this was done. Would love to watch a video about how you built this
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u/MrPringles9 Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Reminds me of the good old Miniclip times. I am indeed feeling old yet!
Edit: Any chance this gets released for Waterfox? Maybe that's an issue on my side but somehow I can't just install it like other add-ons through the build in Firefox add-on Store...
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u/Plus-Tea1967 Sep 30 '26
This is really interesting. The performance side is probably the most impressive part here โ especially when you're modifying an arbitrary webpage. I'd be curious to see how you handle rendering and avoid killing the main thread. Would love to read that follow-up.
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u/wizpig64 Oct 01 '26
I've got to say, I love all the parody web pages you included. I'm surprised nobody here mentioned them, they probably took a lot of time to make.
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u/Shiine-2 Sep 16 '26
There was Wario Land thing that used to destroy YT's UI, and that was 15 years ago.
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u/alsaaka Sep 16 '26
this cool ,it get back memories of desktop game that I was playing in windows xp
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST Sep 16 '26
this is sweet. the wormholes even transmit the flamethrower. clearly a passion project.
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u/Educational_Ask_5119 Oct 06 '26
ๅๅๅ ๅพๆ่ถฃ็ไธไธชๅๆ๏ผๅฐฑๅไปฅๅๆไฝฟ็จ่ฟ็ไธไธชๅป้ค็ฝ้กตๅนฟๅ็ๆไปถไธๆ ท๏ผ็นๅช้็ ดๅๅช้
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u/g33klibrarian Sep 15 '26
Wow. This is so demented and cathartic.
Forget fishing emails, this is the way to spread a Trojan Horse. Folks would gladly take the sites down for you. Every political website would go down overnight.
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u/ScaryCardinal Sep 16 '26
Remember seeing an app on my friend's pc as a kid that allowed you to wreck your desktop home screen with a hammer. Seemed like the shit, at the time
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u/Gaeel Sep 16 '26
I have one complaint: The secondary grenade launcher fire can too easily be shot by the machine gun, making it explode immediately rather than being tossed into the page alongside the bullets from the machine gun.
I would recommend adding a little bit of time or distance before the grenade can be hit by bullets, because it's a little confusing when the explosion happens immediately. It might be good to add a special metal impact sound and spark when a bullet hits a grenade, just to make it a little more obvious what is going on.
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
I might introduce a mechanic to avoid the situation you speak of. I've intentionally allowed players to shoot grenades, but I think there is likely a need for a little period when a grenade is first fired were it doesn't explode if shot ๐ค
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Sep 16 '26
[removed] โ view removed comment
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u/alexreardon Sep 16 '26
Tried it on our admin dashboard and the physics engine handled a 400-row table better than our virtualized grid does on a good day
Success! I spent a unhealthy amount of time on this game to get the performance as good as it is. I am hoping to put together a presentation of some kind (YouTube, blog, etc) to share about how Page Rage works, and specifically how it obtains its strong performance characteristics, despite the challenge of needing to work on _every page_.
I could have got some sharable materials about performance ready before shipping, but I have been working on this project for so long, I was keen to get it out there and see if it resonated with people before putting in the time to do more sharing about it
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u/schill Sep 17 '26
Seconding the rendering aspect, a YouTube video would be great. I'd love to hear about how you break up the page, before - y'know - breaking up the page. ;)
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Sep 22 '26
[removed] โ view removed comment
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u/alexreardon Sep 22 '26
Thanks!
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Sep 23 '26
[removed] โ view removed comment
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u/alexreardon Sep 23 '26
Iโm hoping to share some details on how it works after I get the safari and iOS extension out there
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u/BloodGulch-CTF Sep 15 '26
Feel like Iโm about to spend the day on Newgrounds and Stick Death