IE Date Parsing Doesn’t Work Like Chrome

I noticed a goofy issue today while working with a jQuery countdown plugin. This plugin allows you to set an “until” date so that you counter counts down to zero at a certain date and time.

I was setting the date like this:

element.countdown({
until: new Date(’10/13/14 00:00:00′)
});

In Chrome, this worked just fine. The string “10/13/14 00:00:00″ parsed to a Date object for midnight on October 13th, 2014.

In IE, however (versions10, 9 and 8 at least) it parsed as October 13th, 1914. Why? Who knows. Updating my string to “10/13/2014 00:00:00″ fixed it. My final javascript looked like this:

element.countdown({
until: new Date(’10/13/2014 00:00:00′)
});

So, be aware of this oddity! It caused my whole countdown widget to screw up because the current time was already past the “until” date.#