Remember the TV Guide? Every channel, every hour, one grid, and a dad somewhere circling the Sunday doubleheader in red pen. We missed it. So we built one, and then we kept going: a game screen with a box score and a league table, a proper send-off for games that have ended, and an opening sequence that treats every matchup like it deserves a broadcast package (because it does).
Here’s tonight’s listing.
The Guide
The popup is great at answering “what should I be watching right now?” It was terrible at “what should I be watching at eight?” Up Next gave you a list of start times with no shape to them, so you couldn’t see that six games overlap at four o’clock or that your two teams play back to back.
Tap the new Guide button in the popup header and you get a full browser tab with the day’s games drawn as a timeline:
- Every game is a bar that starts at its real start time and runs as long as that league’s games usually run, grouped under its league
- Live bars carry the score and the clock, finished ones show the final with the loser dimmed, and upcoming ones show the start time and the network
- A finished game’s bar ends where the game actually ended, and a live game that’s running long grows past its slot instead of pretending it’ll be done on time
- A Best time to watch band marks the stretch where the most games are going at once, weighted toward the ones that matter and toward your favorite teams. On today’s page, it only looks ahead
- Page through the week a day at a time, as far as your Up Next setting reaches (at least three days). It opens on today, and today is the only page with a now line
- Click any game and the real game screen slides out beside the grid, PowerScore and charts included. Confetti when your team scores, too. We’re not animals
The game screen gets tabs
Tap into a game and it’s split into Overview, Box score, and Standings now, instead of one long scroll.
- Box score: the line score, a team-vs-team comparison, and player stats for one team at a time, trimmed to the six columns that matter in each sport.
- Standings: the whole league, divisions grouped under their conferences, with the two teams on your screen highlighted in their colors. College basketball and college football show the matchup’s own conference instead, because the full table is a few hundred teams you’ll never scroll to
- Tabs switch instantly. No fade, no half-legible scoreline in between
The live game screen also picked up a few things our sources in the field had been quietly passing along the whole time:
- Ranked teams wear their poll number in front of their name
- Football teams show their remaining timeouts as dots
- The last play gets its own section at the top of the screen, trimmed in the color of whichever team made it
- Baseball shows who’s pitching and who’s batting under the count, and they switch sides every half-inning so each player is always standing under their own team
When the final whistle blows
Finished games used to vanish the second they ended, which was rude of them. Turn on Keep finished games in Settings > Display and they stick around for 24 hours in a new Final section below Up Next. Tap one for the wrap screen: the final score (with the proper Final/OT or Final/SO), how long the game ran, how many people showed up, and the full set of charts for the whole game.
And the tabs you had those games on? Watch a full Saturday and you end up with a dozen tabs showing post-game panels and hot takes. Pick what happens under When a game finishes:
- Leave the tab alone
- Free it from ArenaSwap (it gets unmuted and goes back to being your tab)
- Close it
The tab you’re watching stays put until you move off it, and if a finished game’s tab is the last one in its window, we free it instead of closing it. Nobody’s window disappears on our watch.
The opening act
Open ArenaSwap and every game now arrives as a matchup poster: both crests too big for the card, the two team colors wiping in to meet on a slanted seam, both teams named in full, and a white bar sweeping across to reveal the card underneath. The first open of the day gets the long version, and every open after that gets the quick one. You’ll see it on the first eight games, since a thirty-game Saturday doesn’t need three hundred things moving at once.
Would rather skip straight to the scores? Switch off Opening animation in Settings > Display. It takes effect the next time you open the popup.
While we were in there, the popup header started pinning to the top when you scroll, with the ArenaSwap wordmark folding itself down into the icon. The website’s header does the same trick.
Crests, colors, and the finer details
- A crest is always the team’s real crest, in the team’s real colors. A team only switches to its second color when its main one clashes with the opponent’s
- Crests no longer flash their full-color artwork for a split second before settling
- The Giants’ “ny” stopped getting clipped by the circle in the sticky header
- Both football end zones are lettered with the nickname and crest of the team defending them, and there’s a crest on the 50 now too
- Crests on the game screen got bigger
- NHL teams with clashing colors (Sabres and Blue Jackets navy, Hurricanes and Panthers red) keep their own colors instead of one of them getting handed our orange
- Five navy teams that used to come out grey on the charts are navy again
- Basketball score charts no longer start at zero, so a close game stops looking like two flat lines
- The sticky header counts down to a game that hasn’t started instead of showing 0–0
- Words like Halftime and Final are no longer dressed up in the digital scoreboard font
Postseason, graded on a curve
The postseason boost used to be a flat +5 whether it was a wild card game or a championship. Now it grows as the trophy gets closer, from a quarter of the boost in the first round to the whole thing in the final (the default boost went up to 8). The card also shows which round it is. While sorting all 31 leagues we fixed a few mix-ups: the World Cup’s round of 32 was being scored as regular season, NCAA baseball and softball had their rounds backwards, and the Pro Bowl was getting paid like a conference final. It’s an exhibition. Everyone knows it’s an exhibition.
Fewer check-ins with our sources, fewer missing games
- A league with nothing on for the next day gives its lookouts the night off instead of checking in every couple of minutes
- Live college football games stopped going missing on busy Saturdays
- When our sources go quiet for a moment, we no longer take that to mean “no games today”
- A final no longer disappears because its league had a bad moment, or because the clock hit midnight Eastern
- The popup no longer pings every league at once the second you open it, and the Guide uses the games we already know about instead of asking all over again
Easter eggs, spinners, and other important business
- The Ludicrous Speed egg was rebuilt from the actual film, plaid tunnel and all. It cuts between the bridge and the view from behind the ship, and a click skips it. The hidden speed controls are gone. What controls? Exactly
- The loading spinner learned 39 new jokes, with a lot more hockey, soccer, tennis, and cricket, plus a few nods to famous sports fiascos we’re legally not naming
- Also, one loading message offered to fill the “coolors” for months, and nobody said anything. It says coolers now 🧊
- The team picker loads with the same orange spinner as the rest of the popup
- The settings cog spins when you hover over it. Absolutely necessary. Nobody asked
In other programming:
- The popup is lighter. It has a lot less to load every time you open it, and the charts wait until you actually open a game
- Domes stopped reporting the weather outside. No more thunderstorm chips (or December snow) on games under a roof
- The switch cooldown you set no longer quietly resets itself when your browser takes a breather
- An overturned goal no longer counts as a momentum swing for the other team
- The win-probability chart stopped occasionally coming up blank
- The Standby Stream bar stopped being a white slab with dark text on it
- The review prompt stopped showing up under the loading spinner
- The popup stopped wiggling sideways while the opening animation plays (turns out it had been a little wobbly since forever)
- Both the extension and the website now move to one shared set of animation timings, and if you’ve asked your computer for reduced motion, they both listen
- The website’s live demo stops checking on games once you’ve scrolled past it or switched tabs
- The website’s install button sends Firefox and Edge visitors to their own stores
- A mountain of behind-the-scenes housekeeping we’ll mercifully spare you, including a small army of new tests, which is how half the fixes above were found
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