Free tool
Press start and this page holds your screen awake through the browser itself: no download, no extension, no account. Then read the part every other online jiggler leaves out — what a browser tab cannot do, and what that means for Teams, Slack and a time tracker.
Keep this tab in front. Switch to another tab and the browser drops the lock — it comes back when you return. Closing the tab, or locking the machine yourself, ends it.
Both halves are true at the same time. Only the first one usually gets printed.
A wake lock is a single request to the display: stay on. That is the entire capability the platform gives a web page here, and nothing in it moves a pointer.
Idle is measured somewhere else entirely. Windows, macOS and Linux each keep a counter of the time since your last real input, and every presence indicator and time tracker reads that counter. A page cannot write to it — so to the system, a lit screen with a wake lock is still a machine nobody has touched.
That is the whole reason a browser tab cannot keep a status green, however many of them promise it. The screen stays bright and the status goes Away anyway.
On 13 August 2026 we opened this page and five other browser jigglers at once, started every one of them, then left the machine untouched for five minutes and read the operating system's own idle counter every five seconds.
6
browser jigglers running side by side, this page among them
+303.6 s
of idle time the system counted during the five-minute run — the whole run
0
resets of the system idle timer, from any of the six
Both halves at once: the screen never dimmed for the entire run, and the idle counter kept climbing as if nobody were there. The one browser trick that does move a pointer — a mouse resting on a phone screen that shows a moving pattern — works because a real mouse is doing the moving, not the page. Conditions: Ubuntu 24.04 (GNOME on Wayland), Chrome 150, idle read from the desktop's own idle monitor.
Full method, every block and what the runs do not prove: the measured study →
The row that decides everything is the second one: whether the system idle counter goes back to zero.
| This page | Phone screen under the mouse | USB dongle | Timer-based jiggler | Reaction | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keeps the screen lit | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Resets the system idle timer | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Holds a Teams or Slack status | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Counts as activity in a tracker | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Input that reads as a person, not a pattern | — | No | No | No | Yes |
| What it costs to start | Nothing | A second phone | A dongle | An install | An install, 14 days free |
No. Both read the system idle timer, and a browser page cannot reset it. Any tool that keeps a status active has to produce real input at the operating system level, which means something installed rather than a tab.
There is nothing to detect — it produces no input at all. What your tracker records instead is plain idle time, exactly as if the machine were sitting untouched, because as far as the system is concerned it is.
Something that moves the mouse and types at the system level. That is what Reaction does, and it does it the way a person does — varied speed, natural pauses, real windows — instead of the fixed twitch a dongle or a timer produces. It pauses the moment you touch the mouse yourself.
If what you actually need is a steady activity level while you step away, that takes an app on the machine. Reaction is free for 14 days, and nothing is charged until day 14.
14 days free · $7/mo after
Reaction