220801 - setting |status| doesn't act like setting |window.status|

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Jozef Riha]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

when page loaded in konqueror/IE it displays the persons' names in status bar
when mouse is over their heads. does not work in mozilla.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

It works if you use window.status instead of just status.  As I seem to recall,
this was done purposefully to fix bug 110397 (which gave us NS4 compat).  Not
sure why we need NS4 compat on "status", exactly....

Comment 2

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

This was done to prevent code that does:

  var foo = ...;

where "foo" is something like "status", "location", ... from actually changing
the status or location of the page. 4x and IE are not ECMA compliant and treat
the above differently from:

  foo = ...;

Mozilla's JS engine was made ECMA compliant a long time ago and that caused
scripts on pages to work in unexpected ways. The current scheme is believed to
break less than the alternative, even if it's not ideal. There is no fix for
this bug that does not involve breaking ECMA compliance.

Marking WONTFIX.

Comment 3

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

Is there an ECMA-262 errata for this? Seems like it would be good to make sure 
everyone is interoperable on it.