Is there a more accurate way to create a Javascript timer than setTimeout?

Question

Something that has always bugged me is how unpredictable the setTimeout() method in Javascript is.

In my experience, the timer is horribly inaccurate in

Answer 1

There is definitely a limitation here. To give you some perspective, the Chrome browser Google just released is fast enough that it can execute setTimeout(function() {}, 0) in 15-20 ms whereas older Javascript engines took hundreds of milliseconds to execute that function. Although setTimeout uses milliseconds, no javascript virtual machine at this point in time can execute code with that precision.