Cook Mode: Why Your Phone Screen Should Stay On While Cooking

You're making pasta. Both hands are submerged in dough. You look up to check the next step. The phone screen is black — it went to sleep while you were kneading. You try to touch it with a knuckle because your hands are covered in flour. The screen grudgingly unlocks, but now you've smeared flour on the glass. You scroll to find where you were. You're annoyed.

This happens every time. And it's completely fixable.

The Problem: Auto-Lock Is Designed for Idle Browsing, Not Cooking

Phone screens have auto-lock timers for good reasons: they save battery, they protect privacy when you set your phone down, and they prevent accidental taps in your pocket. The default timeout on most phones is 30 seconds to 2 minutes — calibrated for someone who set their phone down momentarily while doing something else.

Cooking is the worst possible environment for this feature. You're actively using the recipe on screen, but you're not touching the phone — your hands are busy with food. A recipe step that takes two minutes (stir constantly, watch for color change, wait for the onions to soften) will lock the screen right in the middle of the process.

The workaround most people use: set auto-lock to "Never" in Settings. This works, but it means you have to remember to turn it back on, and most people forget. Your battery drains faster, and your phone stays unlocked if you set it down.

The Solution: Wake Lock API

There's a web API specifically designed for this situation. The Screen Wake Lock API lets a web page request that the device keep its screen on while the page is active. The request is scoped to the page — when you leave the page or close the tab, the wake lock is released and the phone returns to its normal auto-lock behavior.

This is exactly the right tool for a recipe app. You activate Cook Mode while you're cooking; the screen stays on. You close the tab when you're done; your phone goes back to normal. No settings to change, no settings to forget to change back.

How RecipeStripper's Cook Mode Works

When you load a stripped recipe on RecipeStripper, there's a Cook Mode toggle in the recipe header. Tap it and two things happen:

1. The page requests a Screen Wake Lock — the phone agrees to keep its screen on as long as this page is open and the device has adequate battery.
2. The recipe display shifts: font size increases, contrast increases, and the layout simplifies. Less information per screen, more readable at a glance from a distance.

Tap Cook Mode again to exit, or close the tab. The wake lock is automatically released either way.

There's one graceful fallback: if the device battery drops below a threshold (typically around 15%), the browser may release the wake lock automatically to conserve power. If that happens, Cook Mode shows a notification that the wake lock was released. This is the right behavior — keeping the screen on at 5% battery while you need to cook for another 20 minutes would leave you with a dead phone.

Browser Support for Wake Lock

The Screen Wake Lock API is well-supported in modern browsers:

• Chrome (Android and desktop): Supported since Chrome 84
• Safari (iOS and macOS): Supported since Safari 16.4 (released March 2023)
• Firefox: Not yet supported (as of early 2026)
• Samsung Internet: Supported
• Edge: Supported

For Firefox users, Cook Mode falls back gracefully: the enlarged text and high-contrast layout still activate, but the screen won't be kept on. A small notice explains why.

The Safari support milestone in 2023 was significant — iOS is the dominant platform for cooking from a phone, and Wake Lock didn't work on iPhones before that. It's now one of the more useful APIs available to web apps on iOS.

Other Cook Mode Features

Keeping the screen on is the main event, but Cook Mode includes a few other adjustments tuned for the kitchen:

Larger text: The font size increases across ingredients and instructions. You can read from further away — the phone propped on the counter, you standing at the stove.

Higher contrast: The background shifts to pure white and the text gets heavier weight. Kitchen environments have variable lighting — overhead lights, stove hood lights, afternoon sun through a window. Higher contrast holds up better across these conditions than the default typography.

Simplified layout: Non-essential elements (share button, original recipe link, save button) collapse or hide. What remains is the recipe. This reduces the cognitive load of glancing at the screen mid-task.

A Note on Privacy and Permissions

Wake Lock doesn't require any special browser permissions — there's no permission popup, no request to allow anything. The API is available to any HTTPS page, and the browser decides whether to honor it based on its own power management policies.

This makes it meaningfully different from native app features like "keep screen on" — there's no installation, no permissions flow, no trust decision to make. You open a web page, tap Cook Mode, and the screen stays on. That's it.

If you want to check whether it's working: watch the screen while you're idle on the Cook Mode page. On a phone without Cook Mode, the screen would lock in 30 seconds to 2 minutes. With Cook Mode active, it stays on.