User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2b5) Gecko/20091204 Firefox/3.6b5 Build Identifier: 3.6b5 If a function declaration is wrapped in a conditional and the conditional is not executed the function name references does not reference the function. This happens in Firefox 3.6b5, Rhino (1.7R2), JavaScript-C (1.8.0 pre-release 1 2009-02-16). Opera (10), Internet Explorer (8) reference the function and judging by the spec (Section 10.1.3) they do it correctly. The behavior however is correct for var statements in conditionals. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: var c=""; function h(a) { if (a) { function c() { return "this is c"; } } return typeof c; } h(0); Actual Results: "string" Expected Results: "function"