Dispatching click event on anchor in timeout stops following link after 1000 ms

Question

Here is the plunkr: https://plnkr.co/edit/zhWBY7G0ALnM8dBSZ5nm?p=preview

If you change that 1001 to 1000, the dispatch will work as expected - the link will be followed. The event handler always gets invoked as expected. It's just the default behavior (following the link) stops working. I googled around for a reason to no avail.

JS:

window.onload = function(){
  var trigger = document.getElementById('trigger');
  trigger.addEventListener('click', clickLink);

  var element = document.getElementsByTagName('a')[0];
  element.addEventListener('click', function(){
    // this will work regardless...
    console.log('link clicked!')
  });

  function clickLink(){
    window.setTimeout(function(){
      var evt = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
      evt.initEvent("click", true, true);
      element.dispatchEvent(evt);
    }, 1001);
  }
}

HTML:

<a href="http://google.com" target="_blank">Google</a>
<span id="trigger">Click Me</span>

This is a simplified version of an angular example in which i try to implement a timeout before following a link in a directive. Same issue. https://plnkr.co/edit/yGBp6PkvpbQkQUTeHX40?p=preview

What is happening? Why the magical 1000 ms cutoff? I'm on chrome.