Built to survive background tabs
Many web timers cheat: they subtract a second every second and hope nothing interrupts. Browsers deliberately slow down background tabs to save battery, so a naive timer set for twenty minutes can ring late. This timer works the other way — pressing Start records the exact target time, and every glance at the display recomputes how long is left from the clock. Throttled tabs, a sleeping screen or a busy processor cannot make it drift; when it reaches zero it beeps three clear tones and tells you time is up. The stopwatch uses the same trick, measuring from real start timestamps rather than counting display updates, which is why its hundredths stay honest.
Everyday jobs for a big, simple timer
- Cooking. Pasta, eggs, a resting roast — set the countdown and keep both hands free; the beep finds you in another room.
- Exercise and physio. Interval training, planks, stretches and ice-pack timings (20 minutes on is a classic) are all start-and-forget countdowns.
- Work sprints. The Pomodoro pattern — 25 minutes of focus, 5 minutes of break — is a timer habit, and the large display across the room works better than a phone buried in notifications.
- Practice tests. Time a student's mock exam or your own typing test rehearsal with the stopwatch, using laps for each section.
- Laundry, parking and naps. The unglamorous countdowns that save real money and real embarrassment.
Using laps well
Laps turn one stopwatch run into a story. Press Lap at the end of each segment — a circuit of exercises, a stage of a recipe, a leg of a relay — and each line records the segment time and the running total. Comparing segments is where the insight lives: runners learn their third lap is always the slowest; cooks learn the sauce stage, not the prep, eats the clock. Reset clears the laps and the clock together, ready for the next run.
A note on phone screens
If you run the timer on a phone, keep the tab in the foreground or the screen awake for the alarm to sound at full volume — mobile browsers may mute or delay audio in fully backgrounded or locked tabs, although the timing itself remains accurate and the display will show "Time is up!" the moment you return. For a boil-over-critical moment, a kitchen timer as backup is never a bad idea.
Frequently asked questions
Does the timer keep working if I switch tabs?
Yes. The timer is anchored to a target time rather than counting down by ticks, so it stays accurate even when the browser slows background tabs to save power. The display catches up the moment you look again, and the end time is still hit on the second.
Why is there no sound file to download for the alarm?
The beep is generated live by your browser's audio system when the countdown reaches zero — three clear tones, no audio file needed and nothing to download. Browsers require a click before sound can play, which is why starting the timer with the Start button is what arms the beep.
How accurate is the stopwatch?
It measures with the browser's millisecond clock and displays hundredths of a second. Clicking or tapping itself adds a small human delay — typically a few hundredths of a second — so it is ideal for cooking, exercise intervals and practice tests rather than official race timing.
What is a lap time?
Pressing Lap records how long the current segment took while the stopwatch keeps running. Each lap line shows the segment time and the total elapsed time, which is how coaches split a run into laps or a cook splits a recipe into stages.
Private by design: the timer and stopwatch run entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to or stored on a server.