Countdown Timer

The countdown is in the tab title

This is the feature that makes a web timer actually usable, and it is the reason to use one in a tab rather than reaching for your phone.

While the timer runs, the tab's title shows the time left. So you can switch to the document you are writing, the code you are working on or the recipe you are following, and glance up at the tab strip to see 18:42 without changing tabs. A timer you have to keep visible is a timer that takes up half your screen; this one does not.

Several timers at once

Add as many as you need with "+ Add Timer", each with its own duration and its own countdown.

This is what a single timer cannot do and what people actually need it for. Cooking is the obvious case — the rice, the thing in the oven and the pan all need different times, and one timer means doing arithmetic instead of cooking. It also suits an exercise circuit with different intervals, or a study block running alongside a shorter reminder to stand up.

Duration or a date

Duration counts down a length of time, with presets at 1, 5, 10, 15, 25 and 30 minutes and one hour. The 25-minute preset is there because it is the standard Pomodoro work block — twenty-five minutes of focus, then a short break — which is the most common reason people open a timer while working.

Target Date counts down to a specific moment instead: a deadline, a launch, an exam, a flight. Same display, same alerts.

The progress bar is a quiet piece of the design worth noticing — it turns amber when under 30% of the time remains and red under 10%, so peripheral vision tells you roughly where you are without reading the numbers.

Keep the tab awake — why browsers make timers drift

Worth explaining properly, because it affects every timer that runs in a browser tab and nobody in this category mentions it.

Browsers deliberately slow JavaScript down in tabs you are not looking at, to save battery and processor time. A hidden tab's timers get throttled, heavily so after a few minutes, and nothing runs at all while the device is asleep. The practical effect is that a long countdown in a background tab can finish noticeably later than it should — not because the timer is wrong, but because the browser stopped letting it count.

So: for short blocks, and with the tab in a window you are using, it behaves as you expect. For a 25-minute work block, keep the browser open and the tab in a visible window — which is what the tab-title countdown is for. And if something genuinely must go off at an exact moment while your laptop is shut, use your phone's alarm. That is not a limitation of this timer specifically; it is how browsers work.

How it tells you

Three signals at once, because one is easy to miss. A short repeating tone plays, the display flashes red, and if you allowed notifications when the page loaded, a browser notification appears — which is the one that reaches you when the tab is behind something else.

If you declined the notification permission, the sound and the flash still work. And if your browser or system is muted, the notification still arrives. Between them something will get through.

Related tools

Stopwatch counts up instead, for timing something of unknown length. Word Counter pairs with a timed writing sprint, which is the most reliable way to get a first draft out of a 25-minute block.