Huge increases of Javascript code performance when using 'strict' (in a very specific case)

I've run into a very interesting discussion on StackOverflow regarding the significant decrease in execution time when using 'use strict' in Javascript.

Basically, there was a simple function added to the prototype of string to count the occurrences of a specific character in the string. Adding

'use strict';

to the function would make it run ten times faster. The answer boiled down to the fact that for normal Javascript the keyword this forces the type to 'object': typeof(this)==='object', while in strict mode it's whatever the object is (in this case string). In other words, to emulate the same behavior without using strict mode we need to "cast" this to the type we need, using a variable

var str=this+'';

It was a cool thing to learn, with the added bonus that I found out about using console.time to measure Javascript performance as well.

Update: oh, by the way, the performance decreased 4 times! by using .charAt instead of the indexer in order to get the character at a certain position.