Countdown Timer

What is this countdown timer for?

Set a duration, press start, and watch it run to zero with a beep at the end. This free countdown timer from ÆON Toolhub is built for the moments when you need time to be visible to other people, not just to you: a classroom exercise, a presentation slot, a workshop round, a quiz, a rest interval at the gym, or an egg on the stove.

That is why it has a full screen mode and a progress ring. From across a room, a ring that is emptying tells the story faster than digits, and full screen turns any laptop or TV into a clock the whole room can read.

How do you use it?

Set the time. Type hours, minutes, and seconds, or tap a preset: 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes. Presets exist because typing three fields for a five minute timer is silly. Manual entry goes up to 99 hours.

Press Start. The ring empties as the countdown runs, and the browser tab title shows the remaining time so you can watch it from another tab.

Go full screen. One tap fills the window. Press Esc or the Exit button to come back.

Pause, resume, reset. Pausing keeps the remaining time. Reset clears it and returns you to the input.

Why does full screen matter so much here?

Because a countdown is usually for an audience. A timer nobody can read is a timer nobody trusts, and people start asking "how long is left?" out loud, which is exactly the interruption the timer was supposed to prevent.

In full screen the remaining time scales with the viewport, so it stays legible from the back of a room, and the progress ring gives a shape to glance at rather than a number to parse. Both exits are always available, the button and the Esc key, so you are never trapped in it mid-session.

How does the alert work?

A short three-tone beep plays when the countdown hits zero, generated in the browser with no audio file to load. The display turns coral and reads "Time is up!", so the alert works even on a muted tab.

If you want to be told while the tab is in the background, click "Enable desktop notifications" once and the browser will ask for permission. After that, every finished countdown fires a native notification alongside the sound.

Does it stay accurate in a background tab?

Yes. The timer stores the moment it should finish and compares it against the clock, rather than counting ticks. Browsers slow down timers in inactive tabs and on battery saver, so a tool that counts ticks drifts, sometimes by minutes over a long countdown. This one corrects itself the instant the tab is active again, and the finish time was never wrong to begin with.

Countdown timer or Pomodoro timer?

A countdown timer runs one stretch of time that you choose, and stops. A Pomodoro timer runs a fixed cycle, usually 25 minutes of focus and 5 of break, and moves between them automatically for as long as you keep going.

Use the countdown for a single, specific block: this exam section, this talk, this set, this recipe step. Use our Pomodoro timer when you want the rhythm of work and rest handled for you across a whole session.

A note on saved state

Nothing is stored. The duration and the countdown live in memory while the tab is open, so reloading resets everything to the defaults and there is no history of what you timed. It also means no account, no cookie for the tool itself, and nothing to clean up afterwards.