I am unable to find out more about this default parameter that I ran across and was hoping that someone could point out an explanation.
In Firefox (3.6 in this case) if
From MDC
Gecko passes an extra parameter to the callback routine, indicating the "lateness" of the timeout in milliseconds.
Because the "actual" delay maybe longer than the delay specified in the setTimeout
call, the "lateness" will be zero if the function was called exactly after the delay specified, non-zero otherwise.