Online timer

This online timer is set to 10 minutes as soon as the page opens: press Start and the time left appears in large digits, with a progress bar and the countdown in the tab title. For another duration, tap one of the nine buttons (from 1 minute to 1 hour) or type hours, minutes and seconds in the custom fields, up to 23 h 59 min 59 s. At zero, three series of beeps ring for about 3 seconds and the frame turns orange. For example, a soft-boiled egg takes 3 minutes and a Pomodoro work session 25 minutes; either is one click away. The alarm is handed to the browser's audio engine at the start, so it rings on time even when the tab is in the background. The main limit: a locked phone or one on silent can keep it quiet, which is why there is a Test sound button.

Tap a common duration (1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 or 30 minutes, or 1 hour) or type a custom duration in hours, minutes and seconds, then press Start. The blue bar shows how much time has gone, and the tab title shows the time left, so you can keep an eye on it from another tab. Pause keeps the remaining time, and Reset goes back to the chosen duration and silences the alarm if it is ringing.

Tick the notification box to get a system alert as well, useful when the sound is off. Test the sound before a long countdown: browsers only let a page play sound after you act on it, with a click for instance. Full screen enlarges the digits so you can read them from across the room.

In the kitchen, 3 minutes for a soft-boiled egg, 10 minutes for pasta, resting time for a dough: full screen keeps the digits readable from the worktop. In class or in meetings, 5 or 10 minutes for an exercise, a speaking turn or a vote, shown on the projector so everyone sees the time left. This works well for teachers at international schools and for language exchange evenings. For focused work, the Pomodoro technique alternates 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest.

For exercise, the timer sets rest periods, planks or stretches. To measure a duration that is not fixed in advance, such as a lap of the track, use the online stopwatch with laps. For a dated event rather than a duration (a flight, an exam, the end of a sale), the countdown to a date works out the days, hours and minutes left.

Browsers slow down pages you are not looking at. Chrome documents a strong limit: after five minutes in a hidden and silent tab, some page timers run only once a minute. A timer that waited for that signal before ringing could therefore be up to a minute late.

Two safeguards prevent that here. The time left is always worked out from the end time set at the start, never by counting seconds down one by one. And the alarm is handed at the start to the browser's audio engine (Web Audio), scheduled for the exact end moment. On a phone, the page also asks the system to keep the screen on (Screen Wake Lock) when it allows it, because a locked screen can suspend sound.

• WHATWG, HTML Standard, Timers, page read on 27 October 2026.
• W3C, Web Audio API 1.1, page read on 27 October 2026.
• W3C, Screen Wake Lock API, page read on 27 October 2026.
• WHATWG, Notifications API Standard, page read on 27 October 2026.
• Chrome for Developers, Heavy throttling of chained JS timers beginning in Chrome 88, page read on 27 October 2026.

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