timezone - How to use a custom time in browser to test for client vs server time difference

Question

I just wrote a little piece of code to show the server time in a webpage. At the moment I just have one machine so I cannot test if the code is working.

Is there a way to tell the browser to use a time configuration different from the one configured in the OS? I have used plugins for Firefox to test different locales, I wonder if there are similar options for time tests.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Create a new empty directory for a separate Chrome user profile. E.g. with

mkdir ~/chrome-profile

You specify the TZ environment variable. You can see the valid timezones for example here, in column TZ.

To start Chrome, use these commands:

• for Mac OS X: TZ='US/Pacific' open -na "Google Chrome" --args "--user-data-dir=$HOME/chrome-profile"
• for Linux: TZ='US/Pacific' google-chrome "--user-data-dir=$HOME/chrome-profile"