BTW, imo, the behavior of |this| is a really unfortunate design flaw of JS. The amount of time that must have been spent learning and teaching this edge case over and over to every person new to the language is ... well, it's big.
So if there is no obvious thing for this to point at, it'll point at the global object. Its just implementation detail that in browsers it points to the window object.
"new", I believe, is actually an ancient relic of the prototypal class system. That's another topic entirely, but it's incredibly cool. Check out Douglas Crockford's articles on inheritance if you want closure on the issue. He has written way more than I have on the topic.
I believe it is quite the opposite. It was a failed attempt to make the prototype-based object system look like class-based one. I vaguely remember reading this opinion in Crockford's "Javascript:The Good Parts" book.