Why is null an object and what's the difference between null and undefined?

(name is undefined)

You: What is name? ^(*)
JavaScript: name? What's a name? I don't know what you're talking about. You haven't ever mentioned any name before. Are you seeing some other scripting language on the (client-)side?

name = null;

You: What is name?
JavaScript: I don't know.

In short; undefined is where no notion of the thing exists; it has no type, and it's never been referenced before in that scope; null is where the thing is known to exist, but it's not known what the value is.

One thing to remember is that null is not, conceptually, the same as false or "" or such, even if they equate after type casting, i.e.

name = false;

You: What is name?
JavaScript: Boolean false.

name = '';

You: What is name?
JavaScript: Empty string

^{*: name in this context is meant as a variable which has never been defined. It could be any undefined variable, however, name is a property of just about any HTML form element. It goes way, way back and was instituted well before id. It is useful because ids must be unique but names do not have to be.}

The difference can be summarized into this snippet:

alert(typeof(null));      // object
alert(typeof(undefined)); // undefined

alert(null !== undefined) //true
alert(null == undefined)  //true

Checking

object == null is different to check if ( !object ).

The latter is equal to ! Boolean(object), because the unary ! operator automatically cast the right operand into a Boolean.

Since Boolean(null) equals false then !false === true.

So if your object is not null, but false or 0 or "", the check will pass because:

alert(Boolean(null)) //false
alert(Boolean(0))    //false
alert(Boolean(""))   //false

What is the difference between null and undefined??

A property when it has no definition is undefined. a null is an object. Its type is object. null is a special value meaning "no value. undefined is not an object, its type is undefined.

You can declare a variable, set it to null, and the behavior is identical except that you'll see "null" printed out versus "undefined". You can even compare a variable that is undefined to null or vice versa, and the condition will be true:

 undefined == null
 null == undefined

Refer to JavaScript Difference between null and undefined for more detail.

and with your new edit yes

if (object == null)  does mean the same  if(!object)

when testing if object is false, they both only meet the condition when testing if false, but not when true

Check here: Javascript gotcha

typeof null;      // object
typeof undefined; // undefined

The value null represents the intentional absence of any object value. It is one of JavaScript's primitive values and is treated as falsy for boolean operations.

var x = null;
var y;

x is declared & defined as null

y is declared but not defined. It is declared with no value so it is undefined.

z is not declared so would also be undefined if you attempted to use z.

TLDR

undefined is a primitive value in JavaScript that indicates the implicit absence of a value. Uninitialized variables automatically have this value, and functions without an explicit return statement, return undefined.

null is also a primitive value in JavaScript. It indicates the intentional absence of an object value. null in JavaScript was designed to enable interoperability with Java.

typeof null returns "object" because of a peculiarity in the design of the language, stemming from the demand that JavaScript be interoperable with Java. It does not mean null is an instance of an object. It means: given the tree of primitive types in JavaScript, null is part of the "object-type primitive" subtree. This is explained more fully below.

Details

undefined is a primitive value that represents the implicit absence of a value. Note that undefined was not directly accessible until JavaScript 1.3 in 1998. This tells us that null was intended to be the value used by programmers when explicitly indicating the absence of a value. Uninitialized variables automatically have the value undefined. undefined is a one-of-a-kind type in the ECMAScript specification.

null is a primitive value that represents the intentional absence of an object value. null is also a one-of-a-kind type in the ECMAScript specification.

null in JavaScript was designed with a view to enable interoperability with Java, both from a "look" perspective, and from a programmatic perspective (eg the LiveConnect Java/JS bridge planned for 1996). Both Brendan Eich and others have since expressed distaste at the inclusion of two "absence of value" values, but in 1995 Eich was under orders to "make [JavaScript] look like Java".

Brendan Eich:

If I didn't have "Make it look like Java" as an order from management, and I had more time (hard to unconfound these two causal factors), then I would have preferred a Self-like "everything's an object" approach: no Boolean, Number, String wrappers. No undefined and null. Sigh.

In order to accommodate Java's concept of null which, due to the strongly-typed nature of Java, can only be assigned to variables typed to a reference type (rather primitives), Eich chose to position the special null value at the top of the object prototype chain (i.e. the top of the reference types), and to include the null type as part of the set of "object-type primitives".

The typeof operator was added shortly thereafter in JavaScript 1.1, released on 19th August 1996.

From the V8 blog:

typeof null returns object, and not null, despite null being a type of its own. To understand why, consider that the set of all JavaScript types is divided into two groups:

1. objects (i.e. the Object type)
2. primitives (i.e. any non-object value)

As such, null means “no object value”, whereas undefined means “no value”.

Following this line of thought, Brendan Eich designed JavaScript to make typeof return 'object' for all values on the right-hand side, i.e. all objects and null values, in the spirit of Java. That’s why typeof null === 'object' despite the spec having a separate null type.

So Eich designed the hierarchy of primitive types to enable interoperability with Java. This led to him positioning null along with the "object-type primitives" on the hierarchy. To reflect this, when typeof was added to the language shortly thereafter, he chose typeof null to return "object".

The surprise expressed by JavaScript developers at typeof null === "object" is the result of an impedance mismatch (or abstraction leak) between a weakly-typed language (JavaScript) that has both null and undefined, and another, strongly-typed language (Java) that only has null, and in which null is strictly defined to refer to a reference type (not a primitive type).

Note that this is all logical, reasonable and defensible. typeof null === "object" is not a bug, but a second-order effect of having to accommodate Java interoperability.

A number of imperfect backwards rationalisations and/or conventions have emerged, including that undefined indicates implicit absence of a value, and that null indicates intentional absence of a value; or that undefined is the absence of a value, and null is specifically the absence of an object value.

A relevant conversation with Brendan Eich, screenshotted for posterity:

null and undefined are both false for value equality (null==undefined): they both collapse to boolean false. They are not the same object (null!==undefined).

undefined is a property of the global object ("window" in browsers), but is a primitive type and not an object itself. It's the default value for uninitialized variables and functions ending without a return statement.

null is an instance of Object. null is used for DOM methods that return collection objects to indicate an empty result, which provides a false value without indicating an error.

Some precisions:

null and undefined are two different values. One is representing the absence of a value for a name and the other is representing the absence of a name.

What happens in an if goes as follows for if( o ):

The expression in the parentheses o is evaluated, and then the if kicks in type-coercing the value of the expression in the parentheses - in our case o.

Falsy (that will get coerced to false) values in JavaScript are: '', null, undefined, 0, and false.

For example window.someWeirdProperty is undefined, so

"window.someWeirdProperty === null" evaluates to false while

"window.someWeirdProperty === undefined" evaluates to true.

Moreover checkif if (!o) is not the same as checking if (o == null) for o being false.

null is an object. Its type is null. undefined is not an object; its type is undefined.

Use null to define something as having no value, use undefined when you expect something might not be defined at all.

For example, if a variable has no value, assign it as null.

var weDontHaveAValue = null;

If you expect that something might be not defined at all, e.g. an optional options argument, use undefined.

if (typeof args.optionalParam !== 'undefined') { }

What is a type?

A type is a way to categorize values. Here is a table with the types in question and their typeof result.

null is not an object, its a value of type Null.

The typeof operator is lying! It returning "object" for null is a mistake in the JavaScript language.

I wrote a chapter about this in my open-source e-book. You can read it here https://github.com/carltheperson/advanced-js-objects