Mystify Screensaver_
A free Mystify-style screensaver for your browser
Eight modes
Make it your own
How to use as a screensaver
Keyboard shortcuts
Related searches
Guide — bouncing polygons with echo trails, fullscreen
Eight modes, three kinds of motion, six palettes and up to 200 echoes per polygon. Drawn on an HTML5 canvas, nothing to install.Choose Classic, Neon, Rainbow, Kaleidoscope, Lissajous, Silk, Wireframe 3D or Pastel, or press 1 to 8. A mode sets every control in one go and starts fresh shapes with a short cross-fade.
Pick the Motion (bouncing, Lissajous curves or wireframe 3D), then set Shapes (1 to 6), Vertices (3 to 12) and Speed (1 to 10). Shuffle shapes or N scatters new ones.
Every polygon leaves exact copies of its earlier positions. Set Echoes (2 to 200), Spacing (1 to 12), Fade, Opacity and Width (0.5 to 6 px).
Choose one of six palettes or edit its six colours, set Cycling and Spread, add Glow or Fill, and turn on Symmetry (1 to 12 folds) with Mirror.
Press Enter Fullscreen, click the animation or press F. Move the mouse or tap to show the buttons; Space pauses, T shows a clock, Esc leaves. Set Auto-change to let it wander through looks on its own.
Modes and shortcuts
- 1 Classic
- 2 polygons, 40 echoes, rainbow
- 2 Neon
- 3 polygons, strong glow
- 3 Rainbow
- 90 echoes across the spectrum
- 4 Kaleidoscope
- 6 folds with mirror images
- 5 Lissajous
- Smooth curved ribbons
- 6 Silk
- 170 thin translucent layers
- 7 Wireframe 3D
- Rotating solids with ghost copies
- 8 Pastel
- Soft filled shapes
- F
- Fullscreen on/off
- Space
- Pause / resume
- N / X
- Shuffle shapes / random look
- A
- Auto-change on/off
- ↑ ↓
- Faster / slower
- ← →
- Fewer / more echoes
- T / P
- Clock / save PNG
- R
- Reset to Classic
- Attract
- Corners are pulled toward your pointer or finger
- Repel
- Corners are pushed away, leaving a hole around it
- Auto-change
- New look every 10, 20, 40 or 90 seconds
- Surprise me
- A random but balanced look
- TV / monitor
- Open the page, press F, leave it running
- screen sleep
- Fullscreen asks the browser to keep the display awake where supported; if yours does not, set the sleep timer to Never
- OS screensaver
- A web page can’t register as one; use fullscreen instead
The Mystify screensaver, explained
What is a Mystify-style screensaver?
The Mystify look is easy to recognise: a few polygons whose corners bounce around a black screen, drawn as bright coloured lines that trail behind them. A COMPUTE! magazine article from November 1992 lists Mystify among the screen savers that shipped with Windows 3.1, and a How-To Geek guide to Windows 11 screen savers lists a Mystify among its six defaults. This page is an independent recreation written from scratch for the browser, with no code or artwork from any operating system, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
How the echo trail works
Each polygon is simulated 120 times per second, and the page stores where every corner was for roughly the last 40 seconds. A trail is not just a faded smear: when a frame is drawn, the polygon is redrawn at its position 1, 2, 3 … N steps ago, so every echo is an exact copy of an earlier position. That is why Echoes (2 to 200) and Spacing (1 to 12 sixtieths of a second between copies) can change instantly without any build-up time. Fade and Opacity decide how quickly older copies dim, and Width sets the line thickness from 0.5 to 6 pixels. Echoes are interpolated between stored steps, so motion looks the same at 60 and 144 Hz.
Eight modes and three kinds of motion
Classic is two bouncing four-corner polygons with 40 echoes. Neon adds a glow, three five-corner shapes and a midnight background. Rainbow spaces 90 echoes tightly and shifts the colour along the trail so each ribbon runs through the whole palette. Kaleidoscope repeats two drifting triangles six times around the centre with mirror images. Lissajous moves each corner along a Lissajous curve (a smooth sine motion on each axis), which turns the echoes into flowing ribbons. Silk stacks 170 thin translucent echoes into soft surfaces. Wireframe 3D rotates a cube, icosahedron, tetrahedron or octahedron in perspective, drawing the edges at the back dimmer than those at the front. Pastel fills the shapes with translucent colour. Motion is independent of mode, so you can combine, say, 3D solids with 8-fold symmetry.
Kaleidoscope symmetry
Symmetry repeats every polygon 1 to 12 times around the centre of the screen, and Mirror adds a reflected copy of each, so 6 folds with Mirror draws 12 images. With Attract or Repel switched on, each corner reacts to the nearest image of your pointer, so the whole pattern responds together.
Colour, glow and fill
Six palettes are built in (Spectrum, Neon, Aurora, Sunset, Ice and Pastel), each a loop of six colours that you can edit, which switches the palette to Custom. Cycling slides the colours over time, Spread sets how much the colour changes along the trail, and each polygon starts at a different point in the palette. Glow adds a bloom made from progressively smaller, blurred copies of the picture added back on top, Fill adds translucent polygon fills, and Additive blend makes overlapping lines add up in brightness. Four backgrounds are available: black, midnight, plum and graphite.
Pointer, Surprise me and Auto-change
Set Pointer to Attract and the corners near your cursor or finger are pulled toward it and spring back when you leave; Repel pushes them away. Surprise me (key X) picks a random motion, palette, trail length and symmetry within sensible limits. Auto-change moves to another mode or a random look every 10, 20, 40 or 90 seconds, and every switch cross-fades from the previous picture.
Run it as a screensaver on a TV or monitor
Click the animation or press F for fullscreen, then move the mouse away; the cursor and the buttons hide after about two and a half seconds. Add the clock for something you can read across the room. In fullscreen the page asks the browser not to let the display sleep, where the Screen Wake Lock feature is supported. It works in any current browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS; on an iPhone the page fills the browser window instead of the whole display.
Performance on phones and TVs
The picture is drawn on a 2D canvas at up to twice the pixel density and no more than about 5.5 million pixels, with the lines of neighbouring echoes drawn in batches when there are many. If the frame rate stays below about 38 per second for three seconds, Auto quality first draws fewer echoes (spaced wider, so the trail keeps its length) and then lowers the render resolution. You can switch it off with the checkbox or by adding aq=0 to the address. The animation pauses while the tab is hidden, and with a reduced-motion setting on your device the page starts in the slow Silk mode.
Save a picture or share your settings
Save as PNG downloads the current frame, which makes a good wallpaper. Copy link writes the mode and every setting into the address, for example ?m=kaleido&sy=8&pa=sunset, and includes the random seed so the same starting shapes come back. Add fs=1 to open the page straight into fullscreen.
Privacy
The animation is drawn and stored entirely in your browser: your settings stay in your browser’s local storage on your device, and the page never sends them anywhere. Apart from loading the page itself, its shared styles, a font and the privacy-friendly analytics script used across this site, the page makes no network requests, and none of them carry your settings.