Wordle will be free forever; right-click and save the whole game

Wordle is the pandemic game we didn't know we needed, so there's understandably some hope that its new owner, The New York Times, will eventually make it easier for everyone and keep Wordle free forever.

But as technologist Aaron Rieke brilliantly explains in a Twitter thread, there's little chance of that happening, because Wordle is a web page and web pages can be saved. (This particular web page runs in client-side code, which helps considerably.) You can download a full copy of the game right now that contains all the answers, jumps to the right new puzzle every day, and still comes with the same "Share". " so you can share those all-important little squares with other players.

It was checked very quickly on the Windows desktop and of course, right-click > save as created a complete copy of Wordle on my desktop like any other web page they could save for offline use. They double-clicked the icon to open it in their web browser and it loaded today's word.

It doesn't retain my previous progress, just like the web version doesn't keep your streak intact when you go from playing Wordle in a desktop browser to playing Wordle on a phone, but you could theoretically start creating a new one if you wanted. , and you wouldn't be surprised if someone finds a way to import progress as well. (Several people have suggested to me that you can get it out of your browser using developer tools since the game uses local storage for that too.)

Where will you play Wordle next? It looks like there will soon be plenty of options besides the one The New York Times suggested will be "initially" free. Because every web browser comes with instructions on how to download web pages for offline use, here are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Apple Safari for Mac. And while we haven't tried two days in a row to see if it loads the next word It sure seems to me that the Reading List you'll find in the iOS copies of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox saves a copy that works offline of Wordle, too.

There's an intriguing question here as to whether this could be a copyright infringement, so we are not necessarily going to recommend that you do any of the above, but saving web pages for offline use is a traditional feature of all these browsers, and Places like the Internet Archive do this consistently and continuously for much of the public web. So we hope The New York Times makes it easier for everyone and keeps Wordle free forever.