TimerPlanStopwatch and tempo
Counting up needs the same honesty as counting down — an absolute start time, so an hour in a background tab is still an hour.
BPM counter (tap tempo)
Tap the beat, read the tempo — median, not average.
Online chess clock
Blitz, rapid or classical — with a real increment.
Count up timer
Counts up, with a target to fill.
Online metronome
Steady because the clicks are scheduled, not fired.
Online alarm clock
Rings from a background tab — and says when it can't.
Online stopwatch
Laps, splits, fastest and average — on the keyboard.
The stopwatch is the centre of this group: start, lap, reset, all on the keyboard, with the fastest and average lap worked out as you go. Splits matter more than the total for anyone timing repeats, and they are the part most online stopwatches leave out.
The metronome and the BPM counter are two directions of the same question. The metronome holds a tempo you name and can be nudged by one or five beats at a time; the BPM counter tells you the tempo of something already playing, from a handful of taps. Both name the tempo in the words musicians use — Andante, Allegro — because a number alone rarely settles an argument in a rehearsal.
The count-up timer is the stopwatch with a target: useful when the question is how far through an hour you are, not how long has passed. The chess clock splits one display into two clocks with an increment, and the online alarm clock is the one tool here that waits for a time of day rather than measuring an interval.
To count down instead, the timers group starts at a length and ends at zero, and the pomodoro timer is the version that repeats. To turn an elapsed time into hours on a timesheet, use the hours calculator rather than doing it in your head — 7:30 on a clock is 7.5 hours on a form, and that gap is where the mistakes live.
Frequently asked questions
Does the stopwatch stay accurate if I switch tabs?
Yes. It stores the clock time you started at and subtracts, exactly like the countdowns, so a browser that throttles the tab in the background costs nothing. A stopwatch that adds a hundredth on every frame loses time whenever the frames stop arriving, which in a background tab is immediately, and that is the version most pages ship.
Why is a browser metronome usually unsteady?
Because it is built on a repeating JavaScript timer, and those are allowed to arrive late — by milliseconds normally, and by a full second when the tab is not in front. At 120 beats per minute a few milliseconds of jitter is audible as a wobble. The metronome here uses the standard fix: a timer that only schedules, and clicks booked in advance onto the audio clock, which is driven by the sound card rather than by the page.
How many taps does the BPM counter need?
Four are enough for a usable figure and eight settle it. The reading is the median gap between taps rather than the average, so one late tap does not drag the number the way it would with a mean, and the steadiness figure tells you how much to trust it: above 95 per cent the gaps barely moved, below 85 the number is a guess.
What is the increment on the chess clock?
Time added to your own clock every time you complete a move, which is Fischer timing — the standard for online and most club chess. Three seconds on a five-minute game is the common blitz setting. It is added when you press, not when your opponent presses, so a fast move genuinely gains you time and a long think genuinely costs it.
Can the alarm ring if I close the tab?
No, and no web page can. The sound belongs to the page: close the tab and there is nothing left running to make it. That is the honest limit of a browser tool against an installed app, and it is why the alarm here says so on the page rather than letting you find out at six in the morning.
How this works
Sources: