Stopwatch, timer & Pomodoro — offline

Timer sites are among the worst-behaved pages on the web: full-screen adverts, autoplaying video, cookie banners, and a request for notification permission before they will count to sixty. This one is a static page that runs entirely in your browser, with nothing uploaded and no permissions requested.

Three modes cover the everyday needs — a stopwatch with laps for timing something open-ended, a countdown for anything with a fixed duration, and a Pomodoro clock for focused work.

This is the detail that separates a working timer from a frustrating one. Browsers deliberately throttle background tabs to save battery, so a timer built on a naive interval tick loses time whenever you switch away — the reason so many web timers finish late by minutes.

This one tracks real elapsed time against the clock rather than counting ticks, so backgrounding the tab does not cause drift. The remaining time also appears in the tab title, which means you can keep an eye on it from another tab without switching back, and a beep marks the end of a countdown and each Pomodoro transition. The sound uses the browser's built-in audio engine, so no notification permission is needed.

Work in focused 25-minute blocks separated by 5-minute breaks. After four blocks, take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes. The timer alternates work and break phases automatically and beeps at each switch, so you are not managing the clock yourself.

The value is less about the specific numbers than about the structure. A fixed, short commitment makes starting easier, which is most of the battle; the enforced break interrupts the tunnel vision that makes people work for hours on the wrong thing; and having a defined stopping point makes it far easier to ignore an interruption until the block ends.

Treat 25 and 5 as a starting point rather than a rule — plenty of people work better on longer cycles, and interrupting genuine flow to take a scheduled break is usually a mistake.