How to use a custom time in browser to test for cl

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

Chrome seems to update its TimeZone as soon as you change it in Windows. Firefox seems to store the timezone value of the system at startup.

With Visual Studio it looks like you can turn the trick on its head. It seems that the Timezone is only read when you first start the debug process. So In my case, what I did was set the TimeZone to, for example, Eastern Standard Time. Start the Visual Studio debugger. I then changed the TimeZone to, for example, Pacific Standard time. The server at this point remained in the Eastern timezone, while my browser was in the Pacific timezone. Now I was able to test the client browser behavior just fine.

If you wanted to test a client in Japan, then just update your TimeZone and the browser will follow it. As long as you don't restart the debug process your server timezone will not change. Also just changing the time (as opposed to the timezone) did not work.

Answer 2

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"