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Guide

How NoScreenSleep works

The whole product fits in one sentence: tap a button, and this tab tells your operating system to keep the screen on. Here's each step in detail — including the one rule that surprises everyone.

Step by step

  1. Choose a duration. Forever runs indefinitely, 1 hour fits a focused session, and Custom accepts anything from 1 to 1,440 minutes. Your choice is remembered in your own browser for next time.
  2. Tap “Keep my screen awake”. The page requests a screen wake lock through your browser. The status pill flips to Screen awake — that's your guarantee the lock is actually held, not just requested.
  3. Keep the tab visible. This is the one hard rule, and it comes from browsers, not us: wake locks only exist on visible pages. A small side window, a second monitor, or a pinned foreground tab all count.
  4. Stop whenever — or don't. Tap the button again, close the tab, or let the timer end it. All three release the lock; none leaves a trace.

What happens if you switch tabs?

Two things, one visible and one invisible. Visibly, the status flips to Paused — tab hidden, because the browser released the lock. Invisibly, the countdown keeps counting against the clock, and the moment you return, the tool reacquires the lock automatically. If the timer expired while you were away, it releases instead of reacquiring — the deadline is real.

Why the countdown never drifts

Browsers slow down JavaScript timers in busy pages, which makes naive “count down every second” implementations lose minutes over long sessions. Ours stores the deadline as a clock time and recomputes the remainder each second — so 30 minutes means 30 real minutes, and we stop precisely on expiry.

The fullscreen button

A nicety for dashboards and recipe duty: the fullscreen toggle makes this tab fill the screen (and therefore guarantees it stays visible). It exits cleanly when you stop the tool. On iPhone it's hidden, because iOS Safari doesn't offer fullscreen to web pages in that way.

When the tool is the wrong answer

Honest software admits its limits. Prefer built-in settings when:

  • The screen must stay on with no browser tab at all — use Windows, Mac, iPhone or Android settings.
  • You need the screen awake while working in other apps on the same display that covers it — a wake lock can't see through a hidden tab.
  • The device lid will be closed — that's hardware-level and off-limits to any website.
  • This is a permanent requirement, not a session — change the timeout once in the OS instead.

Under the hood, briefly

The engine is the browser's Screen Wake Lock API: request, hold, reacquire on visibility, release on timer. If you want the code and the eight rules that govern it, see the technical explainer.