and .... it's buggy
try https://www.google.com/search?q=timer+724+years
click on start, looses most of the time
try https://www.google.com/search?q=timer+724+years
click on start, looses most of the time
You may ask why I'd need a timer in my web browser for 5 days, and you be right to do so.
However, I will concede it is indeed rather buggy. A Google search of "timer 3 minutes" does nothing for me, as it just performs a normal search with no timer widget. A search of "timer 2 minutes" or "timer 4 minutes" works fine.
I can absolutely think of a reasons why someone would use this. For example, a DM in a role playing game might pull up a very long timer as a prop to show their players.
I agree that "the number of times you want a 724 year timer to count to zero" is negligibly small, but that is a minor subset of "the number of times you want to show a 724 year timer counting towards zero"
Update: "timer 100 hours" works, but "timer 101 hours" does not. That is 100 hours is 144,000 seconds, does not seem to be anything special about this number.
Edit: this seems like it's just a display bug and the original time is still preserved. If you search "timer 100 year 1 second" then it formats to "876000h 00m 01s", then the next tick shows "0s", then the next tick shows "99h 59m 59s"
> Another interesting observation is that "timer 723 years" did not bring timer up
That is weird. Even weirder that "timer 723 year" (singular) does seem to work.
Ran into a related bug on a site I was working on the other day and had to learn this browser quirk the hard way.
I agree, upon further thought, that at least an error message would be better for the user (e.g. "Maximum timer duration exceeded").
Try "timer 101 hours". The page title will (very quickly) show "10:05:9x" where x is the 10s digit of the seconds. While the page itself claims it's a one hour timer (59 minutes and some seconds). So the actual time is in there somewhere, just showing up wrong in both places.
It also doesn't seem to let me enter 30 minutes as a timer, but most other minutes times work. So, yes, it's buggy.
EDIT: It's not actually modulo 100 hours, I should note. The display is showing it that way, but since it has the real time stored internally it still counts down. If it were actually modulo 100 hours then it would zero out a 100 hour (or 200 or 300...) countdown immediately, instead these wrap to 99 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds on the first tick.
EDIT: For grins I'd started a 101 hour timer a bit over an hour ago before stepping away from the computer. Despite the display silliness, it actually will run for 101 hours. After the first hour the displayed time rolls back to 99:59:59 and the page title updates correctly. I also noticed that there's a progress bar below the timer, it correctly shows the progress within the 101 hour timer the whole time.