I suggest you use: new Date (year, month [, date [, hours [, minutes [, seconds [, ms ] ] ] ] ] )

To split the string you could try

var s ='2011-06-21T14:27:28.593Z';var a = s.split(/[^0-9]/);//for (i=0;i<a.length;i++) { alert(a[i]); }var d=newDate(a[0],a[1]-1,a[2],a[3],a[4],a[5]);
alert(s+" "+d);

To make your question easier your problem is with:

newDate('2014-02-18 15:00:48')

This work okay in chrome but not in safari. The mdn talks about ECMAScript 5 ISO-8601 format support says:

Alternatively, the date/time string may be in ISO 8601 format. For example, "2011-10-10" (just date) or "2011-10-10T14:48:00" (date and time) can be passed and parsed.

If you include T

newDate('2014-02-18T15:00:48')

You can use new Date('2014-02-18T15:00:48'.replace(/\s/, 'T')).

If you handle a lot of cases like this I will recommend using moment which seems to handle this case very well with or without T: parsing from string. Additionally your whole example is easier with momentjs:

var minutes = moment().diff("2014-02-18 15:00:48",'minutes');