Twenty-five minutes of work, five of break, a longer one every fourth round - and the part no other timer does: the notifications your browser was about to throw at you wait, and arrive on the break.
The problem
You start a twenty-five minute session and the browser spends it interrupting you - a reminder you set last Tuesday, a tab that was due at three, the thing you snoozed to this afternoon. The timer counted perfectly and the hour was not protected. A stopwatch with no authority over anything else on the screen is decoration.
How it works
The Focus tab in the Latr popup draws the leg as a dial and the whole cycle as a bar, with Pause, +5 min, Skip and End beside it - no page to open. All four numbers are yours: the focus leg, the short break, the long one and how often it comes round.
Held, never dropped: a reminder due mid-session arrives the moment the break starts, with its row saying it was held and why. Holding one through the break as well would be holding it through the one part of the hour you were free.
Name the sites that pull you away and they will not open during a focus leg - or turn it round and name only the ones you need. On the break they open normally. The way out is on the page, not buried in settings.
The Focus page draws the leg as a dial you can read from across the desk, and the whole cycle as a bar - four focus legs, the breaks between them, and where you are.
Save the pages one piece of work needs as a bundle. Starting it opens them all and lets exactly those through while the session runs.
Optionally, starting a session saves the other tabs and closes them. They come back when the session ends - not at a break - and the page you are working on stays.
Only in Latr
Start one from any saved page - Open and start focus session - and Latr opens that page first, at the place you stopped reading, then starts the clock. The blocked page names the thing you meant to be doing and takes you back to the tab that is already open. When the leg ends it asks one question with no wrong answer: done, five more minutes, or leave it for now.
What it will not do
There is no run to break, no weekly verdict and no badge for a good day. Minutes from a session you cut short still count, because the work happened whether or not the timer agreed. And committing to a session makes ending it a decision rather than an impossibility - your browser stays yours.
Questions
Yes. Focus time, the short break, the long break and the number of rounds before it are all adjustable, and the next part can start on its own or wait for you. The defaults are 25 minutes of focus, a 5 minute break and a 15 minute break every fourth round.
Yes. Focus sessions, site blocking and held reminders work the same in Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Firefox.
They wait, and they arrive on your break. Nothing is dropped and nothing is silently rescheduled - a held reminder says on its row that it is being held and why. A break delivers, which is the whole reason the break is part of the timer rather than a gap between two of them.
Yes. A session is stored as the moment it ends rather than as a number counting down, so closing the popup, sleeping the laptop or restarting the browser cannot knock it out of step. The toolbar badge shows the minutes left while it runs.
It can hold a list of sites shut during a focus leg, and they open normally on the break. Subdomains are covered, so one entry is enough. You can also turn it round: name the three sites you do need and everything else stays shut, which is a list that ends - naming every site that distracts you is one nobody finishes.
Not in the strict sense, and it is worth being exact. Latr redirects the tab to a page saying how long is left; it does not filter the network, so a page may flash before it lands and it cannot stop a sub-resource. Real filtering needs "read and change all your data on all websites" on the install dialog, and Latr shows no permission warnings at all. That trade is deliberate.
No, and that is on purpose. Committing to a session makes ending it a two-press decision and freezes the site list for the duration, which is enough friction to stop an idle click. It is never made impossible: a browser you cannot use during an emergency is worse than a session you ended early, and there is no account and no support desk that could rescue you.
Yes, if you switch it on. Starting a session saves every other tab in the window to Saved windows and closes them, leaving the page you are working on. They come back when the session ends rather than at each break, because handing twenty tabs back for five minutes and taking them away again is worse than never hiding them. It is off until you choose it.
No. It records minutes, sessions and how many you stopped, drawn as seven bars on the dashboard - with no average, no comparison with last week and no score. Those are the shapes that turn a record into a verdict, and nothing here gets worse for missing a day. Minutes from a session you cut short still count, because the work happened whether or not the timer agreed.
Free, no account, and nothing leaves your device. About ten seconds to install, and one keystroke to use.
Also on Brave, Vivaldi, Arc and Opera - straight from the Chrome Web Store listing.
