The options for replacing local programs with online alternatives are increasingly broad. Some web apps no longer have anything to envy their offline counterparts, and can get you out of a bind at any time, or become a permanent solution. That's how we arrive at MiniPaint, a free Paint clone developed by ViliusL that runs in your browser. All the basic tools you expect from an editor are there, and it includes dozens of effects to apply in a couple of clicks.

Paint Free Online: A Free Paint Clone for Your Browser
Free Paint clone

The market offers a large number of free graphic editors. Paint.NET remains an excellent choice for those who prefer a middle ground between a casual and a professional environment, but it would be a mistake to overlook projects like Krita, the inexhaustible GIMP, and PhotoDemon, which really impressed us.

MiniPaint: Access a Free Paint Clone Online

Paint Free Online: A Free Paint Clone for Your Browser
Layer control, hexadecimal color selection, not bad at all!

Now, what about online editors? Photopea and Pixlr haven't gone anywhere, but if you're looking for another alternative, I think you should pay a visit to MiniPaint's portal, a creation by ViliusL. In essence, we're dealing with a free Paint clone with some interesting aspects. One of them is layer support, something that doesn't exist in the original Paint for Windows, but is very useful in any session. The layer menu also has a command you'll need to get familiar with in MiniPaint: raster conversion. If you don't do this, the vast majority of functions will remain locked.

Paint Free Online: A Free Paint Clone for Your Browser
Effects? All you want and more, but...

The menu has everything you'd expect from a standard graphic editor, including eyedropper, bucket, magic wand for erasing, and auto-crop to selection. However, here I want to highlight the bulge-pinch tool, which works wonders when tweaking expressions. Making grandpa Simpson even angrier than usual was very simple.

MiniPaint isn't left behind with effects either. Its menu has a total of 25 entries, not counting the common filter sections and Instagram-inspired filters. A huge success of MiniPaint is the addition of a browser for all effects, which serves as a preview. Instead of experimenting with effects one by one, you can choose what you want from the browser and go directly to its properties to apply it. Other editors should include this.

Paint Free Online: A Free Paint Clone for Your Browser
... the best is to use the browser.

To finish, I must admit that MiniPaint is a work in progress, and there are things that are conspicuously absent. The lack of reference points to modify selections is a mistake other editors have made in the past, but MiniPaint doesn't even offer a customization field to specify its size in pixels. Another aspect I'd like to see in MiniPaint is a more complete Content-Aware Fill (Blur and Clone are acceptable substitutes), but these are details that can definitely arise in future versions. Give it a try!

Official site: Click here