READY
READY
A timer is only useful while you can see it, and a browser tab stops being visible the moment you switch to the application you are actually working in. That is the real difficulty with a timer on the web, and there are three answers to it depending on what you are running.
The first is a floating window. Where your desktop browser supports it, the button beside the sound control lifts the countdown into a small window that sits above your other windows. Drag it into a corner and it stays there while you work. The button is drawn only where the browser can actually do it, so if you cannot find it, this answer is not yours and the next two are.
The second costs nothing: the remaining time is written into the tab title, so a background tab shows the countdown without being the tab you are looking at. Do not pin it, though. A pinned tab shrinks to its icon and the title goes with it. The third is a second screen with the timer in fullscreen, the most readable of the three if you have the monitor to spare. Press F, and note that a phone browser may refuse it.
None of the three can drift. The countdown is anchored to the wall clock rather than counting its own ticks, so a browser that throttles a hidden tab cannot lose time. What a hidden tab does cost you is freshness: after a few minutes out of sight Chrome runs the update roughly once a minute, so a glance at the tab title can be up to a minute stale. It is never wrong, only late, and a floating window is visible by definition and so does not have the problem at all.
Because it would not do anything there. The feature is Document Picture-in-Picture, and the page asks the browser whether it has it rather than checking a list of names, so the button appears wherever it will work and stays out of the way where it will not. Support keeps widening; the tab title is the fallback that needs nothing at all.
Yes. The floating window is its own window, so minimising the main one leaves it where it is. Even if you close everything, the timer works out the remaining time from the clock when you come back, so nothing is lost.
Above a borderless window, yes, which is how most games are run now. A game holding the screen in exclusive fullscreen will cover it, because that is the operating system's decision rather than the browser's. For a stream, the overlay is the better tool: it composites the countdown into the scene itself.