TimerPlanTimers and countdowns
Everything in this group ends at zero and makes a sound. What differs is what you set — a length, a time of day, a repeating cycle, or several at once.
Online timer
Set a length, press start — it rings even from a background tab.
Classroom timer
Readable from the back row, with the sound off.
Countdown timer
Counts to 3:00 pm, not for twenty minutes.
Interval timer
Work, rest, rounds — advancing on their own.
Kitchen timer
Pasta, oven and tea at once — each rings for itself.
Pomodoro timer
25 on, 5 off — and it counts the rounds.
Sleep timer
A quiet countdown that ends in darkness.
Six timers, and the differences between them are about what you set rather than how they count.
The online timer on the front page takes a length and rings. It reads 5m, 90s, 1h 30m and
5:30 alike, keeps its setting in the address bar, and runs full screen when a room needs to see it.
For a fixed length you set often, the timer by duration pages open already loaded.
The countdown timer works the other way round: you give it a time of day and it counts to that. Set it at breakfast for a three o’clock call and it stays right all day. A time that has already gone counts to tomorrow instead of going negative, which is the sane behaviour for alarms and the one most pages get wrong.
The pomodoro timer repeats. Twenty-five minutes of focus, five off, a longer break every fourth round — and a round counter, because the point of the method is the count, not the countdown. The sleep timer is the quiet one: it fades the screen to black at zero and says plainly what a browser cannot do, which is stop another app’s music.
The kitchen timer holds several named countdowns in one tab — pasta, oven, tea — each with its own alarm. The classroom timer is built to be read across a room: huge digits, and a colour that turns amber under a minute and red under ten seconds so it works with the sound off.
When you want to count up instead of down, that is the stopwatch, and when you want to know how long something took between two clock times, the time duration calculator answers without a timer at all.
Frequently asked questions
Which of these should I use for a plain five minutes?
The timer on the front page, or the preset page for that length. Both are the same tool with the same alarm; the preset pages exist because a link that already holds the length is faster to reach from a search result than a box you have to fill in. If five minutes is something you set several times a day, the address bar carries it — bookmark the page with ?t=5m and it opens ready to start.
What is the difference between a timer and a countdown here?
A timer counts a length: twenty minutes from whenever you press start. A countdown counts to a moment: 3:00 pm, whatever time it is now. They feel similar and behave differently at the edges — a countdown to a time that has already passed today rolls to tomorrow rather than going negative, and a countdown keeps its meaning if you set it hours in advance.
Do these keep running when the tab is in the background?
Yes. Every timer in this group stores the exact clock time it should finish rather than counting seconds as they pass, so a tab that gets frozen catches up as soon as it is drawn again. The alarm is scheduled into the audio clock the moment you press start, which is what lets it sound from a background tab. The time remaining is written into the tab title and drawn into the tab icon so you can read it without switching back.
Can I have several running at once?
That is what the kitchen timer is for: as many named countdowns as you like in one tab, each ringing for itself. It is deliberately the one thing a search engine’s built-in timer cannot do — that widget holds exactly one countdown, so two things cooking means two tabs and twice the attention.
Will the alarm wake a sleeping laptop or a locked phone?
No, and nothing in a browser can. A suspended machine stops running the page altogether, so the sound waits until the device is awake; on a phone the tab is frozen the moment the screen locks. What this page can do is keep the screen from sleeping on its own while a timer runs, which it does through a screen wake lock, and that covers the ordinary case of a phone left face-up on the counter.
How this works
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