Free Online Timers

Drift-free timers: a Pomodoro with session tracking, a millisecond stopwatch with laps, a countdown with alarms, and a time-zone converter for scheduling worldwide.

4 free time & focus tools

About these tools

Browser timers have a reputation for drifting, and most of them deserve it: a naive setInterval loses time whenever the tab is throttled, and background tabs are throttled aggressively in every modern browser. Run a 25-minute Pomodoro in a background tab with a naive timer and it can finish minutes late.

These timers avoid that entirely by storing an absolute target timestamp and deriving the remaining time from Date.now() on every frame. Throttling can make the display update less smoothly, but the countdown itself stays exact — switch tabs for ten minutes and it will be exactly ten minutes further along when you return. Alarms use the Web Audio API rather than an audio file, so they fire instantly and cannot be blocked by an autoplay policy.

Frequently asked questions

Will the timer keep running if I switch tabs?

Yes. Time is computed from an absolute end timestamp rather than counted down frame by frame, so background throttling cannot make it lose time. The visual countdown may update less often, but the elapsed time stays exact.

Will I hear the alarm if the tab is in the background?

In most browsers, yes — audio from a tab you have already interacted with continues in the background. Enable browser notifications for a visual alert as well.

What is the Pomodoro technique?

A focus method of working in fixed intervals — classically 25 minutes — separated by short breaks, with a longer break after every fourth interval. The fixed boundary is what makes it work: it turns “work until I am tired” into a series of finite, achievable commitments.

Do these tools need an internet connection?

Only to load the page. After that everything runs locally, including the alarm sound, which is synthesised in the browser.

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