What can I use a countdown timer for?
Common uses include workout intervals (rest periods, HIIT rounds), cooking and baking, study sessions (e.g. the Pomodoro technique — 25 minutes work, 5 minutes break), meditation sessions, presentations and speeches, and any task where you need an audible reminder when a set amount of time has elapsed.
Will the timer stay accurate if I lock my phone or switch apps?
The countdown recalculates remaining time from the original end timestamp rather than simply ticking down a counter, so brief interruptions (switching tabs, backgrounding the browser) will not cause drift. However, on mobile, some browsers may pause JavaScript timers entirely when the screen is locked or the tab is fully backgrounded for a long time — for critical alarms, your phone's native clock/alarm app is more reliable.
Why didn't I hear the alert sound when the timer finished?
Most browsers require a user interaction (like a click) on the page before they will allow audio playback, as an anti-autoplay-spam protection. As long as you started the timer by clicking a button on the page, the alert should play normally. If your device is on silent/mute, the alert will still be visually shown ("Time's up!") even if no sound plays.
Can I set a timer for more than an hour?
Yes — use the custom timer fields to enter any combination of hours, minutes, and seconds (e.g. 1 hour 30 minutes), or use the "1 hour" preset as a starting point and adjust from there.
Why did the timer drift by a few seconds?
Browsers deliberately slow down timers in tabs that are not visible, to save battery, so a timer that counts by repeatedly adding one second falls behind whenever the tab is in the background. Well-built timers avoid this by recording the target time when they start and comparing against the clock on each tick, so they show the correct remaining time the moment you return regardless of what the browser did meanwhile. Drift of more than a second or two in a foreground tab is unusual.
Does it keep working if I lose my internet connection?
Once the page has loaded, yes — the countdown runs entirely in your browser and needs no further contact with a server, so a dropped connection mid-timer does not stop it. What will stop it is closing the tab or the browser, since nothing is stored on a server to resume from. Reloading the page also restarts it. For anything you cannot afford to lose, a device alarm is more robust than a browser tab.