Timers, stopwatches and clocks that just work

An online timer with nothing in the way

Set a length, press start, and the ring empties as the time goes. That is the whole tool. There is no account, nothing to install, and no step between arriving and measuring. The presets cover the lengths people ask for most, and the box beneath them takes anything you type: 7:30 for seven and a half minutes, 90s, 5m, or 1h30m.

The reading is deliberately large. A timer is usually read from further away than the rest of a web page, from the other side of a kitchen or across a desk, so the digits are sized for that distance and set in tabular figures, which means each digit occupies the same width and the number does not jitter as it counts. The full screen button hands the reading the whole display, which is the mode for a projector, a second monitor, or a phone propped against a jar.

The part most browser timers get wrong

Start a timer, switch to the thing you are timing, and come back. That sequence is the entire point of a timer, and it is where a surprising number of browser timers fail.

The reason is technical but not complicated. Many are driven by the browser's animation frame callback, which fires about sixty times a second while a page is visible and stops completely the moment the tab is hidden. A timer built that way freezes when you switch away and never sounds its alert. Others count by adding to a running total on each tick, which drifts as soon as the browser throttles the page to save battery: you come back after ten minutes and the timer believes four have passed.

This one works from a deadline instead. Pressing start records the moment the timer should end against your system clock, and every reading after that is simply the difference between that moment and now. A hidden tab, a throttled page, a laptop that slept and woke, none of them change the answer. The alert fires when it should whether or not this is the tab in front of you, and the tab title carries the time remaining so you can pick the timer out of a crowded tab strip without clicking through them.

While a timer runs it also asks the browser to keep the screen awake, so a phone left face up on a counter does not go dark thirty seconds in. That is a request the browser is free to refuse, on low battery for instance, and if it does the timer still keeps correct time. The screen simply dims, as it would anyway.

Choosing a length

Most people arrive wanting one specific length, so the common ones each have their own page with the timer already set and an explanation of what that length is usually for:

• 1 Minute Timer
• 3 Minute Timer
• 5 Minute Timer
• 10 Minute Timer
• 15 Minute Timer
• 20 Minute Timer
• 30 Minute Timer
• 1 Hour Timer

Five minutes is the one people ask for most, and not because it is a round number. It is the length of a break that does not turn into a different activity, of a warm up, of a pasta that says four to six on the packet, and of the bargain people strike with themselves to start something they have been avoiding. Ten minutes is the tidying length. Twenty is the nap that ends before deep sleep begins, which is why it does not leave you worse than before. Thirty is the length of a task that deserves a slot in a day rather than a line on a list.

When a plain timer is not the right tool

A countdown is only one of the shapes time comes in, and using the wrong one is more annoying than it sounds. If you need to know how long something took rather than tell it when to stop, the stopwatch counts up instead, with laps and splits and a table you can copy out at the end. If the pattern repeats, the pomodoro timer runs work and break lengths of your choosing and keeps count of the rounds, so you are not resetting anything by hand.

If what you are waiting for is a date rather than a duration, the countdown counts to a moment on the calendar and puts that moment in the page address, so the link you send someone else shows them the same countdown. For rounds of effort and rest, the interval timer sounds the last three seconds of every phase, which is what makes it usable with the screen out of reach. And if you want to be told at a time of day rather than in a number of minutes, the alarm clock survives a page reload and rings until you stop it.

Sound, and turning it off

When the time is up the timer plays three rising notes, long enough to notice and short enough not to become something you have to go and silence. The speaker button turns it off, and a muted timer still shows plainly that the time has gone.

Browsers refuse to play audio that no interaction asked for, which is a sensible protection against pages that start making noise on their own. That creates a problem specific to timers: by the time an hour long timer ends there has been no interaction for an hour. This page solves it by preparing the sound at the moment you press start, while your click still counts, so the alert can sound an hour later without one.

What happens to what you type

Nothing you set here leaves your device. There is no server holding your timers, because there is no server involved in running them at all: once the page has loaded, everything happens in your browser, which is also why the tools keep working if your connection drops.

Three things are remembered between visits, all of them stored by your own browser on your own machine: whether you chose the light or dark theme, and the lengths you set on the pomodoro and interval timers. Clearing your browser data removes them. Nothing else is kept.

Keyboard shortcuts

On a desktop, the space bar starts and pauses, and R resets. Both are ignored while you are typing a custom length, where a space is just a space. Every control is reachable by tab and has a visible focus ring, and the readings are announced to a screen reader when they change state rather than on every tick, which would be unusable.