774645 - Move Object.prototype.watch to Object.watch

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 638054

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Mariusz Nowak]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20120717030555

Steps to reproduce:

Imagine following code:

var someFunction = function (data, options) {
  if (options && options.watch) {
    // watch option set, let's do something about it
  }
};

someFunction('foo');


Actual results:

It will act in unexpected way, as not standard method exist on Object.prototype.

I found that very surprising, even standard committee decided to froze Object.prototype cause of such issues, and defines all new functions for objects on Object constructor directly. Why Firefox breaks that rule?


Expected results:

Firefox should move all not standard methods from Object.prototype as they can break user code and provide them as functions on Object constructor

Comment 1

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

(In reply to Mariusz Nowak from comment #0)
> I found that very surprising, even standard committee decided to froze
> Object.prototype cause of such issues, and defines all new functions for
> objects on Object constructor directly. Why Firefox breaks that rule?
Because Object.prototype.watch was present in SpiderMonkey far before the decision has been made.

> Firefox should move all not standard methods from Object.prototype as they
> can break user code and provide them as functions on Object constructor
Rather, non-standard methods should be either completely removed or standardized.

Comment 2

[David Mandelin [:dmandelin]]

I agree, I don't see how it can be moved elsewhere and still work--we should remove it when we have the replacement.