The strict mode was introduced in ES5. It is a way of enforcing strict rules while coding in JS. Not all browsers support strict mode, so always test your code.

Advantages:

  1. Disable some silent JS errors and throw them instead.
  2. Performant code in specific instances where a JS engine supports performance optimizations
  3. Code improvements
    • No duplicate keys in objects
    • Variable declaration without var keyword
    • Error on duplicate function arguments

Enabling strict mode

  • File-level: add "use strict" on top of the file before any other statements.
  • Function level: add the same "use strict" on top of the function body before any other statements.
  • Module level: Modules introduced in ES6/ES2015 are in strict mode by default.

Changes applied in strict mode

  1. Variable declaration without var keyword 
    someVariable = 17;
console.log(someVariable); // 17

    This is a completely valid code. Even though we did not use let, var or const to declare the variable, JavaScript works without an issue. This would force JS to create a global property, and that could cause side effects in a large application (variable name conflict and modifying global variables).

    Strict mode solves this by throwing an error.

  2. No duplicate keys in objects 
    const myObject = {
     name: "Parwinder",
     age: 34,
     car: "MiniCoop",
     name: "Bhagat"
 }
console.log(myObject.name); // Bhagat

    Again, completely valid under non-strict mode (sloppy mode) but throws an error in strict mode.

  3. Throw error when trying to delete undeletable properties of an object 
    "use strict"
delete Object.prototype; // throws a TypeError
  4. No duplicate arguments in functions 
    function sumOfNumbers(a, a, b) {
    return a + a + b;
}

console.log(sumOfNumbers(1, 2, 3)); // 7

    The above code is valid too. It ends up with unexpected results. The value of a is set to 2, and the sum returns 7 instead of our expectation, 6. Strict mode throws a syntax error.

  5. Assigning NaN to a variable has no failure feedback in sloppy mode. Strict mode throws an exception

🚨 There’s no way to cancel “use strict”. Once we enter strict mode, there’s no way to turn it off.