PROXX

Minesweeper does not need an introduction and PROXX does not try to give it one. Open it and you get the exact same three choices Windows shipped in 1990 — Easy at 8x8 with 10 mines, Medium at 16x16 with 40, Hard at 24x24 with 99 — plus a custom slider up to 40x40, and then the exact same game: click a cell, flood-fill the blanks, count the numbers, flag what you're sure about, and hope the last few 50/50s go your way. Google Chrome Labs built PROXX in 2019 as a showcase for what a browser could do on constrained hardware, and reading the source confirms it down to the mine-placement code — _placeMines() clears a 3x3 safe zone around your first click and then drops the rest uniformly at random into whatever cells are left, which is precisely the algorithm Microsoft shipped thirty-six years ago. If you came here for a new idea about Minesweeper, there isn't one.

What there is, instead, is one of the more thorough accessibility and input jobs a browser game has ever had, and it's worth taking seriously on its own terms rather than as a footnote.

The Clear/Flag switch actually solves the touchscreen problem

Minesweeper's entire control scheme was built around a mouse with two buttons: left-click to reveal, right-click to flag. A touchscreen has one input and no equivalent gesture that doesn't also mean "select text" or "open a menu," which is exactly why the genre mostly didn't survive the transition to phones intact. PROXX's answer is a chunky switch pinned to the bottom of the screen, labelled Clear on one side and Flag on the other, that changes what a tap does across the entire board. Testing it directly — not just reading that the toggle exists, but tapping it, tapping a cell, watching it flag instead of reveal, toggling back, and confirming a flagged cell does nothing when tapped again in Clear mode until you unflag it — it works exactly as designed, every time, with no accidental reveals. This is precisely the problem this shelf exists to solve, and PROXX solves it about as cleanly as it can be solved.

The rest of the touch experience holds up too. A tap on an unrevealed cell floods outward exactly like a classic Minesweeper click; a loss reveals every mine on the board with the one that killed you ringed in a different colour from the rest, and the game does this without ever needing a second confirmation tap. The two frictions worth naming: the Medium and Hard presets are wider than a phone's viewport, so reaching the far columns means scrolling sideways rather than seeing the whole board at once, and the difficulty picker itself is a plain HTML <select> that's a little fiddly with a thumb compared to the rest of the interface.

The accessibility work is the real headline

Underneath the touch layer, PROXX's board is a genuine ARIA grid: every cell is a <td role="gridcell"> containing a button with an aria-label that reads "hidden," "flag," "3," or "black hole" depending on state, and the whole table carries role="grid" with a proper roving tabindex. None of that is decoration — it was tested directly on desktop by tabbing into the board and clearing a chunk of it with arrow keys and Enter alone, no mouse and no touch, and it worked exactly as the source suggests it should: the focus square moves cell to cell, Enter reveals, and a flood-filled region opened up from a single keypress the same way a click would. The Clear/Flag switch also announces itself through an aria-live="assertive" region ("flag mode on" / "flag mode off"), so a screen reader user isn't left guessing which mode a silent toggle switch is in. On top of all that, the code still carries dedicated key handling for T9 feature phones (the number pad doubles as arrow keys), which is a genuinely unusual thing for any game released in 2019, let alone a puzzle game, to bother supporting. Very few browser games earn a high accessibility score on more than good intentions; this one earns it on tested behaviour.

Is Minesweeper with better controls still worth it?

That's the real question, and the honest answer is: for the right person, yes. If you want to play actual Minesweeper on your phone right now, without downloading an app that bundles ads or a data-hungry SDK, PROXX is free, open source, genuinely ad-free (the Google Analytics beacon it originally shipped has been stripped before hosting it here), and it just works. If you need a game a screen reader can actually narrate or that a feature phone can actually run, PROXX is close to the only option in this entire shelf that clears that bar, and that's a real service. But if you already have a Minesweeper you're happy with — and most platforms have had one for decades — there is nothing in PROXX's actual puzzle to pull you away from it. The black-hole skin, the swirling tile icons and the ambient nebula background are a pleasant, well-produced coat of paint over a game that plays identically to the one it's repainting.

GitHub puts PROXX at 1.4k stars and 131 forks as of this writing — respectable numbers for a Chrome team open-source release, and a sign the accessibility work in particular got noticed by other developers, though that's a different audience from "people who play it for fun" and shouldn't be read as broad player-side buzz.