It would be useful to be able to display dates as dates in addition to the "x time ago" string.

you can mouse over the timestamp to get the exact date

Yep, wherever we put a timestamp on the site, whether absolute or relative to the current time, we use the HTML <time> element and put a title on it generated by your browser in your current locale. This ensures that you can always get a date that is formatted exactly the way you expect, in your timezone, etc.

Thanks.

This ensures that you can always get a date that is formatted exactly the way you expect

I do not though, For some reason I get this different time format. My system's time format is set to YYYY-MM-DD.

I wonder what went wrong here though. I think the problem is that my locale is different from my time display settings.

Are you using firefox? If so, try this in the settings:

No, I'm using Google Chrome as my browser. I changed the UI display language to japanese and that changed the date format to YYYY/MM/DD. Still uses / for separating the values :(

Unfortunately the date format setting in chrome by default seems to be linked to the language.