What a 5 minute timer is for
Five minutes is the most-set timer there is. It is the break you promised yourself, the egg, the meditation, the "five more minutes" that turns into twenty when nobody is counting.
What people set it for
- A hard-boiled egg with the yolk still soft in the middle
- A short meditation or breathing session
- The break between working blocks
- A five-minute tidy, warm-up or cool-down
How this timer behaves
The countdown is stored as the moment it should finish, not as a number being decremented, so switching tabs or minimising the window cannot make it run late, and pausing and resuming is exact. Through the final minute the readout and its ring turn red and pulse, giving you a warning before the alert rather than only at it.
It does not start on its own. The alarm is generated in your browser, and browsers keep audio silent until you interact with the page — so a timer that started by itself would be a timer that finished in silence. One tap on start is what makes the sound work.