Date.parse() is highly browser dependent in terms of interpretation of timezones etc, while creating a Date object works consistenly across all browsers. 

We typically write out timestamps in our processed csv as "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.sss".  So I am splitting up the timestamp into the component parts and building a date object based off that. Any character which is not a number is used as a split delimiter
2014-01-03 10:00:00.123 is split into [2014, 01, 03, 10, 00, 00, 123]