Bug 37123

Debugging a cross browser bug in my company's product I came across this. I'm not certain what aspect of the JS sort method is involved. The situation is we have and array of objects, each of which has a "name" property that's a string. We want to sort the array, so I called sorted_ar = ar.sort(function(a,b){ return a.name > b.name; }); This worked fine in Firefox on Windows and Snow Leopard, in Chrome on Windows and Snow Leopard, but failed in IE7 (meh) and Safari on both platforms. I tried the WebKit nightly build (Version 4.0.4 (6531.21.10, r57054)) and it failed there too. Here's a complete test case: ----- var ar = new Array(); if (console == undefined) { var console = { log : function(s) { print(s) } } } ar[0] = {name: "zzz"}; ar[1] = {name: "qqq"}; ar[2] = {name: "mmm"}; ar[3] = {name: "aaa"}; function dump(a) { for(i=0; i< a.length; i++) { console.log(i + ": "+a[i].name); } } dump(ar); console.log("sorting"); sorted_ar = ar.sort(function(a,b){ console.log("services.sort: comparing "+a.name+" to "+b.name); return a.name > b.name; }); dump(ar); ----- (I added the console definition so it would run in a command line JS shell). The successful results look like this (FF/Mac): ---- 0: zzz 1: qqq 2: mmm 3: aaa sorting services.sort: comparing zzz to qqq services.sort: comparing zzz to mmm services.sort: comparing qqq to mmm services.sort: comparing zzz to aaa services.sort: comparing qqq to aaa services.sort: comparing mmm to aaa 0: aaa 1: mmm 2: qqq 3: zzz ---- and the failing ones like thi (Safari/Mac)s: ---- 0: zzz 1: qqq 2: mmm 3: aaa sorting services.sort: comparing qqq to zzz services.sort: comparing mmm to zzz services.sort: comparing mmm to qqq services.sort: comparing aaa to qqq services.sort: comparing aaa to mmm 0: zzz 1: qqq 2: mmm 3: aaa ---- This should be easy to reproduce by opening a WebInspector window and pasting the test code into the console.