That's misleading at best and most likely just false, and it's worrying it's so upvoted.

There's no historical record explaining why this was designed this way, but we can infer some things. HTTP is very unlikely a factor, XHR / AJAX has been added years after the .sort() function. Additionally, it doesn't make sense in the context that other comparisons are not string-wise (sort()/quicksort is basically a series of comparisons).

The trouble with JS arrays is that they can contain any values - e.g. [false, undefined, 1567, 10, "Hello world", { x: 1 }]. How do you sort those? There must be one function to compare every combination of value, but how do you compare booleans and objects?

There's no such function which would provide reasonable results. In that context, doing .toString() and then string-wise comparison/sorting doesn't seem that crazy - every object has .toString(), it will compute something, and often it will work well enough.

There could be some additional smartness - if the array contains numbers only, it could choose to use a number-wise comparison function. But that would require a) extra implementation complexity (JS was famously designed in short time) and b) reduced performance - since JS runtime doesn't know what type of values are present in the array, it would have to scan the whole array before starting the sort. But I guess the a) was the decisive factor in the beginning and backwards compatibility prevented improving the function later.

thank you for the explanation, that does clarify things