Why are the calculated dates different in Internet Explorer and Chrome?

Question

So I'm using this to try to get the day before today. This works fine in Chrome but IE thinks its the day before that. My current system date is 09/05/2014 10:14 (PST).

var todaysDate = new Date();
var maxDate = new Date(Date.UTC(todaysDate.getFullYear(),todaysDate.getMonth(),todaysDate.getDate()-1));

Its worth mentioning that both IE and Chrome return the value 9 for the following.

console.log(todaysDate.getDate());

So if today = 09/05/2014 (PST)

Chrome gets 08/05/2014

IE gets 07/05/2014

What's going on? Why is IE interpreting this differently to Chrome?

Answer 1

It's a timezone issue - timezones behind GMT will be pushed back a day by your code.

Try setting the "hours" to 12. This will ensure that all timezones are on the same day.

So apparently UTC+14 is a thing. Try todaysDate.getUTC* methods instead and be sure to include the hours/minutes/seconds.