Check if an element is present in an array

Just use indexOf:

haystack.indexOf(needle) >= 0

If you want to support old Internet Explorers (< IE9), you'll have to include your current code as a workaround though.

Unless your list is sorted, you need to compare every value to the needle. Therefore, both your solution and indexOf will have to execute n/2 comparisons on average. However, since indexOf is a built-in method, it may use additional optimizations and will be slightly faster in practice. Note that unless your application searches in lists extremely often (say a 1000 times per second) or the lists are huge (say 100k entries), the speed difference will not matter.

Code:

function isInArray(value, array) {
  return array.indexOf(value) > -1;
}

Execution:

isInArray(1, [1,2,3]); // true

Update (2017):

In modern browsers which follow the ECMAScript 2016 (ES7) standard, you can use the function Array.prototype.includes, which makes it way more easier to check if an item is present in an array:

const array = [1, 2, 3];
const value = 1;
const isInArray = array.includes(value);
console.log(isInArray); // true

ECMAScript 2016 incorporates an includes() method for arrays that specifically solves the problem, and so is now the preferred method.

[1, 2, 3].includes(2);     // true
[1, 2, 3].includes(4);     // false
[1, 2, 3].includes(1, 2);  // false (second parameter is the index position in this array at which to begin searching)

As of JULY 2018, this has been implemented in almost all major browsers, if you need to support an older browser a polyfill is available.

Edit: Note that this returns false if the item in the array is an object. This is because similar objects are two different objects in JavaScript.