Countdown Timer
Countdown timer with quick presets and an alarm that keeps beeping until you stop it. Set anything up to 99:59:59 and the tab title tracks the time left.
Ends five minutes after you start
Space starts the countdown and pauses a running one, while nothing else is focused.
How it will tell you
Lengths
Set it by hand
Hours stops at 99, minutes and seconds at 59 — the longest run is 99:59:59, and a shared link is held to the same ceiling.
When it ends
The alarm keeps sounding until you stop it. Test it once — a timer you cannot hear is a timer that did not work.
While it runs
Holds the screen on while this is running. Your device still sleeps once you stop.
Popular timer presets
Each one opens the timer already set to that length. They are links, so they can be bookmarked and shared.
Which timer length should you use?
Common durations and what they are good for. Tap one to load it into the timer above.
How to use
- Tap one of the Lengths (1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45 or 60 minutes) or type your own into Hours, Minutes and Seconds.
- Add a label if you want one. It caps at 40 characters and turns up in the tab title and in the share link.
- Press Start, or Space while nothing else is focused. The button becomes Pause, and pausing holds your place: Resume carries on from the same second rather than restarting.
- When it lands, Reset stops the beeping and puts your duration back on the clock. Start beside it runs the same length again straight away.
How the timer behaves
Five minutes is what the countdown timer opens on, which tells you something about what people mostly use it for. Tap one of the lengths, or type into the Hours, Minutes and Seconds boxes, then press Start. The ring around the digits drains as the time goes, and the line under it names the clock time the run will end at. At zero a beep starts and repeats every nine-tenths of a second until you press Reset, because one polite ping is easy to miss from the next room.
Label it if you tend to run more than one in a day. Forty characters, and the label rides in the tab title next to the clock, so a pinned tab reads 12:04 · Laundry instead of leaving you to guess. Under When it ends you pick one of four sounds and hear it with Test sound before you rely on it. Alarm sound is ticked from the start. Desktop notification stays off until you tick it and the browser asks permission, and it arrives only while the tab is in the background.
Three minutes for tea, saved as a link
Tap the 3 min preset, type Tea into the label box, press Start. The readout drops to 2:59 and the tab title follows it, reading 2:59 · Tea. Switch away and it keeps counting there. When it lands, the title flips to Time's up · Tea and the beeping begins.
Hit the share button and you get back a link ending ?d=180&label=Tea&autostart=1. Bookmark that. Open the bookmark tomorrow and the three minutes are already running, and one click anywhere on the page is enough to let the alarm sound.
Good to know
- Hours stops at 99 and both the minutes and seconds boxes stop at 59, so the longest run you can set is 99:59:59. For anything measured in days, the Countdown to Date page fits better.
- The beep needs the page open at the moment it lands. The countdown itself is saved against a real clock time, so closing the tab and coming back finds it still running with the missing minutes already gone, or tells you how many minutes ago it finished.
- A share link carrying autostart=1 starts counting the instant it loads, but no browser will let a page make noise before you have interacted with it. Click anywhere on the page once and the alarm is cleared to ring.
Frequently asked questions
How do I set a 20 minute timer?
Tap the 20 min preset and press Start, or put 20 in the Minutes box if you want to add seconds on top of it. The nine presets are 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45 and 60 minutes. Anything else you type by hand.
Why does the alarm keep beeping instead of sounding once?
Because a single beep gets missed. It repeats about once a second until you press Reset or start a fresh countdown. If that is too much for where you are sitting, untick Alarm sound and the timer runs silent.
Can I run it silently and still be told when it finishes?
Untick Alarm sound and tick Desktop notification. Your browser asks permission once. After that you get a system notification the moment the timer lands, though only while the tab is in the background. The tab title keeps counting either way.
What happens if I close the tab halfway through?
The countdown is saved to local storage as a real clock time, the moment it is due. Reopen the page and it works out where things stand: still running with the time you were away already deducted, or finished, with a line saying how long ago that was. The beep only happens if the page is open at the moment it lands.
Does the count drift while the tab sits in the background?
It doesn't. The timer works from the finish time rather than counting ticks, and a worker outside the page watches for that moment. Browser throttling of a hidden tab changes nothing about when the alarm goes off or what the clock reads when you switch back.
Can I make the digits readable from across the room?
The fullscreen button beside Reset blows the dial up to fill the screen. That is the setup for a classroom, a workshop bench, or a kitchen you keep walking in and out of.
How do I send someone a timer that is already set?
Copy share link writes the duration and the label into the URL and adds autostart=1, so whoever opens it gets your exact timer running. A 45-minute exam timer comes out as ?d=2700&label=Exam&autostart=1.
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