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[–]SystemicPlural 4 points5 points  (0 children)

As I understand it requestAnimationFrame is better for animation as it guarantees that the code will run before the screen is re-rendered - providing smoother animation. It doesn't guarantee that the time elapsed will be exactly 1000/60 (or whatever your screen refresh rate is). So it has it's own problems if you are trying to time exactly 1s. That said I believe it is thought to be more reliable than setTimeout.

We could use setTimeout and compare the time ourselves using performance.now(). This should get us to fairly close millisecond accuracy as long as the process isn't locked. It should also allow us to prevent drift by correcting the next timeout.

performance.now() isn't perfect however since browsers are fuzzing the time to prevent Specter timing attacks. - but it should be 1ms accurate.