Online Timer

How to use

1. Type hours, minutes and seconds, or tap a preset (1 min, 3 min, 5 min…).
2. Press Start. The bar under the digits shows how much time has passed.
3. Pause / Resume at any point, and add time on the fly with +1 min. While it runs, the extra controls fold away and the digits grow.
4. When time is up the alarm beeps three times (phones also vibrate) and the digits blink. Press Start to run the same time again.

For a classroom, meeting or stage, use Fullscreen: the digits fill the screen and, in supporting browsers, the screen stays awake while the timer runs. Add ?t=seconds to the address to open a preset — /en/timer/?t=180 is a three-minute timer.

Why it stays accurate in a background tab

Most online timers count down one second at a time. Chrome, Edge and other browsers save battery by slowing down code in tabs you are not looking at — after a few minutes, sometimes to once a minute. So if you switch to email while a typical web timer runs, its alarm can go off half a minute late.

AlarmTimer avoids this in two ways:

• It remembers the finish time, not a counter. Every time the screen is drawn it recalculates what is left, so a throttled tab never falls behind.
• It schedules the alarm in advance. The moment you press start, the beep is queued on your device's audio clock for the exact finish time. Audio playback is not throttled, so it sounds on time even in a hidden tab. Pausing or resetting cancels it.

On phones, the operating system may silence a browser that is fully closed or whose screen is off. For anything important, keep the screen on.

Handy times

To record how long something takes, use the stopwatch; to count down to a date, use the countdown.

FAQ