window.toString.call is undefined in IE8

Question

When you run:

window.toString.call(\"\")

everything\'s fine in FF/CH but in IE8 you get a script error. Investigating a bit more it turned

Answer 1

window is a host object, and the ECMAScript Language Specification (3rd edition) does not require host objects to be derived from the native Object object. In IE (and probably in some other browsers) host objects aren't, so they don't support any of the native methods or properties (although they may have methods or properties with the same names as native methods or properties which are accessible to scripts).

If all you want is to get hold of the language implementation's default native toString method then you should use Object.prototype.toString.call("").