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Comment by cvburgess | Hacker News Reader

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cvburgess·

You must be logged in to use a timer? Pass...

Edit: Here's what I see http://imgur.com/0bA7aJ3

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You can also use DuckDuckGo:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer+4+minutes+33+seconds

Ha I love that DDG changes the title of the window, so you can be on a different tab and still see the timer. Awesome. This is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/zHyPyYX.png Also it will say [Done!] and play an alarm. Very cool.

I actually do use DDG prolifically and have come to love all the widgets. I just think its silly for google to demand that you log in to use a glorified egg timer. Why do you need me to log in for that?

Presumably they do this because there are other widgets which require login and they haven't bothered to separate the two.

I hate to be an apologist for what looks like a login-grab, but Google Now is closing in on platform transcendence (browser, phone, watch, etc).

I could easily see a timer you set on your desktop triggering a notification on your phone or watch if you've left the computer. I hope that's where they're going with this...

I see where your coming from, but if you want a cross-platform timer solution, relying on a google widget seems like a reach. At the vary least they should let anyone use the timer and only force you to login if you wish to continue the session on another device.

That's actually new-ish.

Google's timer used to work just via JavaScript. If you closed the page you lost the timer.

The strange thing is that the timer STILL works like that. If you close the page you lose the timer. The login seems to do absolutely nothing.

Opening in Incognito/Private-browsing mode yields the same results for me as well.

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