Countdown Timer

How to use Countdown Timer

1. Enter the minutes and seconds you want to count down from.
2. Press Start — the display turns amber for the final ten seconds.
3. Pause to hold the remaining time, or Reset to return to the value you set.
4. The countdown is visual: the display turns red and shows a time’s-up message, so keep the tab where you can see it.
5. Changing the minutes or seconds while stopped updates the starting value immediately.
6. Works offline once the page has loaded.

The tab title is the useful part

While the timer runs, the page title shows the time remaining, and changes to a time’s-up marker when it finishes. That means you can start a timer, switch to whatever you were doing, and still see the countdown in the tab strip without coming back — which is most of the point of a browser timer as opposed to the one on your phone.

What it is good for

Cooking, where hands are dirty and a phone is not. Timed exercises and stretches. Teaching and presentations, where a visible countdown does the work of nagging for you. Interviews and exams. Timeboxing a task you would otherwise let sprawl — twenty-five minutes on the clock is the entire mechanism of the Pomodoro technique, which has a dedicated tool here if you want the breaks tracked too.

Keep the tab alive

Browsers aggressively throttle timers in background tabs to save battery, and a phone may suspend the page completely when you lock the screen, so a countdown running in a backgrounded mobile tab can drift or stall. On a desktop, a background tab is usually fine. For anything where a missed alarm has a real cost — an oven, a test — keep the tab visible, or use a device alarm that survives the screen going off.