labs · new in 2026
Small free tools that do one job
Every tool in the old Labs did one thing. Smoothbox opened a box. JSJuicer made a script smaller. That habit still produces the most useful things on the web, so here is a short 2026 list in the same spirit: free tools that each do a single job and get out of the way.
What counts
A tool makes this list if you can open it, do the one thing, and close it again. No account to make before it works, and no feature list longer than the job. Most of these are the kind of page you bookmark once and use for years.
Checking your markup
The original blog wore "valid XHTML" and "valid CSS" badges in its footer. The services behind them are still running. The W3C Markup Validation Service reads a page and lists what's wrong with its HTML, and the W3C CSS Validation Service does the same for stylesheets. Neither has changed its job in twenty years.
Checking colour contrast
Green Chaud was built to be easy on the eyes. Whether text is easy to read is now something you can measure: the WebAIM Contrast Checker takes two colours and tells you whether they pass the WCAG contrast thresholds. It is run by WebAIM, a non-profit based at Utah State University.
Shrinking an image
The JSJuicer idea, applied to pictures. Several free in-browser tools take one image, let you choose a modern format and a quality level, and show the before and after side by side. The file never leaves your machine, which is the part worth checking before you pick one.
Testing a regular expression
Paste a pattern and some sample text, and the matches light up as you type. A good regex tester also explains
each part of the pattern in plain words, which beats a console.log loop for working out why
something won't match.
Planning wedding family photos
Not every single-job tool is for developers. At a wedding, the family group photos are the part of the day most likely to run long, usually because nobody wrote down who should be in which picture. The free family photo list generator does that one thing: a photographer or a couple uses it to get a family group-photo list for the day, so the formal photos run from a plan instead of from memory.
Why small still wins
Smoothbox lasted because it did less than its rivals and did it on the framework people already had. The tools above work the same way. Each one solves a problem you can describe in a sentence, and none of them asks you to move your whole workflow inside it. When a tool like that disappears, you notice the gap straight away, which is the best test of whether it was doing its job.