Study Timer (Pomodoro)

How to use

Press start and work until the chime. The classic pattern is twenty-five minutes of focus, a five-minute break, and a longer break after every fourth session — all four numbers are adjustable in Settings if a different rhythm suits you better. Name the task if you want the tab title to remind you what you sat down to do.

Skip ends the current interval early and moves to the next one; reset puts the current interval back to full. Your settings and your session count are remembered on this device.

Why the time stays right in a background tab

Browsers deliberately slow down timers in tabs you are not looking at — a repeating timer that would normally run several times a second may be cut back to roughly once a minute to save battery. A timer built by counting those ticks down therefore loses minutes while you work in another tab, and finishes late without ever appearing to be wrong.

This one never counts ticks. When you press start it records the wall-clock moment the interval should end, and every update simply asks how long is left until then. Throttling can make the display refresh less often while hidden, but it cannot make the time wrong — switch back and it is already correct.

The chime is handled separately again, because a late chime is just as useless as a wrong clock. It is scheduled ahead of time on the audio hardware's own clock, which runs independently of the page, so it sounds at the right moment whether or not the tab is in front. Turn on desktop notifications and you will also get a system notification you can see from another window.

Keeping a phone awake

On a phone or tablet the screen will normally sleep mid-session. The keep the screen awake setting asks the browser to prevent that while the timer runs, and releases it as soon as you stop. It needs a browser that supports the Screen Wake Lock API — the setting says so if yours does not, rather than silently doing nothing.