Do you have any example which any one can verify (e.g. jsbin.com)?

Ok; I'm interpreting this as:

Object.getPrototypeOf(console).log

returns Undefined as opposed to a function for it.

Same thing happens in FireFox as well.

But in IE Object.getPrototypeOf(console).log is defined.

According to [1], the console object is [NoInterfaceObject] which means that there is no "Console" interface. IIUC, in that case there is no prototype object.

[1] https://console.spec.whatwg.org/#console-interface
[2] https://heycam.github.io/webidl/#NoInterfaceObject

I think that the current behavior is expected, but yukishiino@ should confirm.

FYI: There is a discussion of static console functions (I didn't follow it though)
https://github.com/whatwg/console/issues/3

[NoInterfaceObject] only means that the global object (e.g. |window|) does not have a property named the interface name (e.g. window.Console), and has nothing to do with the prototype object.  My understanding is that we should have console APIs on the prototype object instead of on the platform object.

IIRC, Console APIs are implemented by devtools team without using the binding code generator.

pfeldman@, could you triage this issue?

In particular: Object.getOwnPropertyNames(console) is returning all the properties, where Object.getOwnPropertyNames(Object.getPrototypeOf(console)) is returning an empty list.

Now that there's WebIDL for the console API in a spec, ideally we'd use the bindings generator for them so that the semantics really match what the spec says.  dgozman: thoughts?

domenic@, is https://console.spec.whatwg.org/#console-interface the latest thinking on how this should work? I assume it's not in IDL because other V8 embedders also want the same API?

No, the spec is not quite updated with the latest changes. It was blocked for a long time on adding namespaces to Web IDL, which happened recently.

The current consensus (which all non-Edge browsers follow) is that `console` is a namespace object, which means it has no prototype or constructor. Except, for legacy-compat reasons, `console.__proto__` must be an empty object, instead of being `Object.prototype`. See https://github.com/whatwg/console/issues/3#issuecomment-219549472

I can prioritize getting the spec updated if that would help people. But looking through this bug thread, I think this is working as intended and should be WontFixed.

My understanding of why this is not implemented in IDL in Blink is that the dev tools team prefers to implement things in JavaScript instead of C++?

We changed behavior recently to what domenic@ describes after the discussion linked above.

Implementation is not in IDL because it's now a part of v8-inspector, not blink.

Historically, there was never an agreement on console from different browsers, so we tried to unify with Mozilla but then changed a bit after lengthy discussion. Note there was a fix even after that, which changed console.prototype from Object.prototype to an empty object, because original behavior broke existing code. See  issue 613631 .

We can follow up with implementation once the spec is updated.

To be clear, once the spec is updated, I think the spec and Chrome will match.

 Issue 621839  has been merged into this issue.

For historical web-compatibility reasons, the namespace object for console must have as its [[Prototype]] an empty object, created as if by ObjectCreate(%ObjectPrototype%), instead of %ObjectPrototype%. [1]

[1] https://console.spec.whatwg.org/#console-namespace