Yes it does change things. You're not understanding that "this" is a keyword, not a variable reference, and as such, it is not treated the same in closures. The

Yes it does change things. You're not understanding that "this" is a keyword, not a variable reference, and as such, it is not treated the same in closures. The "this" KEYWORD is dynamically bound at runtime, not lexically scoped like every other variable. It is impossible to close over "this", yet it's what you usually want to do. That is why people use ugly work-arounds like "var me = this;". So "this" is a pitfall and language design flaw that traps many JavaScript programmers (even experienced ones) into thinking they're writing correct code that looks like it does one thing, which actually does a totally (and sometimes subtly) different thing.