A Brief History of JavaScript

Understanding how JavaScript was invented helps us appreciate why the language behaves the way it does, how it evolved over the years and why certain features and limitations are still here today.

The best place to get started would be wikipedia. Here are the important milestones extracted from this wiki page:

• 1995: Netscape Navigator, the only browser in the market, was shipped with LiveScript and the interpreter. It was later re-branded as JavaScript to be associated with the then popular Java language.
• 1996: Microsoft released JScript, along with Internet Explorer. Difference between the two scripting languages caused long lasting incompatibility, with certain websites only supporting one browser or the other.
• 1996: Netscape submitted JavaScript to ECMA in an attempt to standardize specification
• 2005: Debut of Ajax, a set of technologies using JavaScript to allow web applications to load data in the background. Sparked a renaissance period of JavaScript, leading to creation of popular libraries like jQuery and Prototype.
• 2008: Google Chrome shipped with V8 engine, the first to use just-in-time compilation, significantly improving JS execution time.
• 2009: Multiple browser vendors came together to help build the ES5 standard.
• 2015: Release of ES6, renamed ECMAScript 2015.
• Beyond: From 2016 onwards, a new version of ECMAScript standard was published with minor updates to existing standard. JS is now considered a mature language.