Timers & countdowns
Alarm clock
Set a time and get on with your day. Your browser keeps a live local clock and rings with a chime and an on-screen alert the moment the alarm is due.
The alarm rings only while this tab is open. It uses your device's local time.
How to use the alarm clock
Set the time
Choose the hour and minute you want to be alerted at. The alarm is evaluated against your device clock, so it fires at the wall-clock time you set.
Pick a zone if you need one
Setting the alarm against another city's clock is what makes it useful for calls abroad — you name the moment in their terms and get alerted in yours.
Allow the sound
Browsers block audio until you have interacted with the page, so press the test button once. The tone is generated in the browser rather than downloaded.
Leave the tab open
The alarm needs the page to stay open to fire. Pin the tab and keep the device awake; a browser tab is not a substitute for a phone alarm on a sleeping laptop.
An alarm that means the same thing in every zone
A normal alarm is set in your own local time, which is fine until the thing you are setting it for is defined in someone else's. A call at 9am New York time is 2pm in London and 3pm in Berlin, and setting it in your head is exactly where the mistake happens — particularly in the weeks when one side has changed its clocks and the other has not.
Setting the alarm against the zone the event is defined in removes that step. You enter the time as it was given to you, and the alarm resolves it to a real instant and alerts you when that instant arrives, whatever your own clock says.
The practical limitation is worth being blunt about: this is a browser tab, not a system alarm. If the tab closes, the device sleeps, or the browser suspends background tabs to save power, the alarm will not sound. It is reliable as a desk timer on a machine you are using, and unreliable as a wake-up alarm overnight.
For anything you genuinely cannot miss, put it in your calendar as well — a calendar event with a proper zone attached is delivered by software designed to survive sleep, restarts and travel.
When you'd reach for it
A call in another zone
Set the alert against the caller's clock so you cannot mistranslate it.
Timeboxing work
A hard stop at a chosen hour, without reaching for your phone.
Market opens
Be at the desk the moment an exchange in another region starts trading.
Cooking and chores
The obvious one — an alarm on the machine already in front of you.
Medication reminders
A fixed daily time while you are at your desk.
Ticket and auction deadlines
Be ready a few minutes before a sale opens in a foreign zone.
Questions & answers
- Does the alarm work if I close the tab?
- No. Because everything runs locally in the page, the tab must stay open for the alarm to ring. Leave it open in the background and it will fire at the set time.
- What time zone does it use?
- Your device's local time. The live clock at the top shows exactly what the alarm is comparing against.
- How do I stop it ringing?
- An alert appears with a Dismiss button when the alarm fires; pressing it silences the chime.