title: Chrome JavaScript Date Constructor Appears to Get Dates Before 1884 Wrong
body: <p>If I pass the unix milliseconds timestamp value for 1/1/1753 (at midnight) (-6847786800000) to the JavaScript Date() constructor in Chrome, the Date Chrome gives me looks really weird. I get other weirdness when I use the Date() constructor that takes seven parameters. Examples are below.</p>
  
  <pre><code>Chrome:  new Date(-6847786800000): Mon Jan 01 1753 00:03:58 GMT-0456 (Eastern Standard Time)
  Firefox: new Date(-6847786800000): Mon Jan 01 1753 00:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Note how Chrome made the time 3:58 and the timezone GMT-0456 (the weird timezone appears to be about the same amount as the weird time (4 minutes).)</p>
  
  <pre><code>Chrome:  new Date(1753, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0): Mon Jan 01 1753 00:00:00 GMT-0456 (Eastern Standard Time)
  Firefox: new Date(1753, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0): Mon Jan 01 1753 00:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Note how Chrome gives me 0:00 for the time, but still has that GMT-0456 timezone.</p>
  
  <p>Playing around with various dates, this odd behavior seems to start with dates before 1884 - not sure of the exact date. 1/1/1884 acts as you would expect, but 1/1/1883 gets this "off by 3:58" behavior.</p>
  
  <p>Is this a bug or am I missing something?</p>
  
  <p>I tested this on:
  Chrome 67.0.3396.99 (Official Build) (64-bit);
  Firefox 61.0 (64-bit);
  IE 11 and Edge 42.17134.1.0 give the same results as Firefox</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong></p>
  
  <p>This does not look like a duplicate of <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50609860/browsers-time-zones-chrome-67-error">Browsers, time zones, Chrome 67 Error</a> to me. That question is talking about <em>timezones</em> being different. It uses 1900 as an example. I'm talking about the <em>time</em> being different. And it only affects stuff before 1884. It does not affect 1900 dates. </p>
  
  <p>Why would changing the timezone change the actual time? I'm not a timezone wizard but that still seems wrong to me.</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong></p>
  
  <p>So yeah, probably a duplicate in some sense. Don't know for sure if Chrome changed it's behavior with this. But it does come down to the fact that right now Chrome will see old unix timestamps, before 11/18/1883 at 12:03:58 PM, as different points in time than other browsers. So watch out if you need to work with timestamps for old dates. I switched away from using timestamps to avoid this issue.</p>