After playing for half an hour i closed the browser and when i came back, my progress was gone. do the saves not work or did i do something wrong? (is there soem hidden save button?)

Restarted before posting this and now ive even lost that minimal progress... i guess i cant ever stop running the game to make any progress

I'm sorry. This is a bug. There is a save and even an auto-save, but you need to go to the menu to save (press Escape or the power button on the top left to get there). The game will automatically save to your selected slot when you go to the menu. You can select another slot and press Save to overwrite it as well.

I will fix this in the next build. For now, please go to the menu before closing the browser.