History of JavaScript

JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich in 1995. It was developed for Netscape 2, and became the ECMA-262 standard in 1997. After Netscape handed JavaScript over to ECMA, the Mozilla Foundation continued to develop JavaScript for the Firefox browser. Mozilla's latest version was 1.8.5 (identical to ES5). Internet Explorer (IE4) was the first browser to support ECMA-262 Edition 1 (ES1).

Timeline of JavaScript and ECMAScript Versions

Year    ECMA    Browser/Details
1995           JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich
1996           Netscape 2 was released with JavaScript 1.0
1997    ES1    ECMAScript 1 released, supported by IE4
1998    ES2    ECMAScript 2 released, Netscape 42 with JS 1.3
1999    ES3    ECMAScript 3 released, IE5.5 supported ES3
2000           Netscape 62 & Firefox 1 released with JS 1.5
2008    ES4    ECMAScript 4 was abandoned
2009    ES5    ECMAScript 5 released
2011    ES5    Supported by IE9, Firefox 4
2012    ES5    Full support in Safari 6, IE10, Chrome 23
2013    ES5    Full support in Firefox 21, Opera 15
2014    ES5    Full support in all browsers
2015    ES6    ECMAScript 6 (ES6/Harmony) released
2016-2018      ES6 full support across all major browsers

Notes

* Internet Explorer 9 did not support ES5 "use strict".
** Internet Explorer 11 does not support ES6 fully.

The ECMA Technical Committee 39 (TC39)

In 1996, Netscape and Brendan Eich took JavaScript to the ECMA international standards organization. A technical committee (TC39) was created to develop the language.

In 2008, when the TC39 committee met in Oslo to discuss ECMAScript 4, they were divided into two camps:

The ECMAScript 3.1 Camp: Microsoft and Yahoo wanted an incremental upgrade from ES3.
The ECMAScript 4 Camp: Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and Google wanted a major upgrade (ES4).

On August 13, 2008, Brendan Eich announced the resolution:

ECMAScript 4 was renamed to ES5.
ES5 would be an incremental upgrade of ECMAScript 3.
Features of ES4 would be picked up in future versions.
Work would begin on a new major release (ES6), codenamed "Harmony".

ES5 was a huge success. It was released in 2009, and all major browsers were fully compliant by 2013.