Assignment 5

Question 3: History of JavaScript

JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich while working at Netscape. It was first released with Netscape 2 and later became the official ECMA-262 standard in 1997. After Netscape handed JavaScript to ECMA, the Mozilla Foundation continued its development for the Firefox browser. Mozilla’s last version, 1.8.5, was equivalent to ES5. Internet Explorer 4 (IE4) was the first browser to support ECMAScript Edition 1 (ES1).

Timeline of JavaScript & ECMAScript

Year	ECMA Version	Details / Browser Support
1995	-	JavaScript invented by Brendan Eich
1996	-	Netscape 2 released with JavaScript 1.0
1997	ES1	ECMAScript 1 released, supported by IE4
1998	ES2	ECMAScript 2 released, Netscape 4.2 with JS 1.3
1999	ES3	ECMAScript 3 released, supported by IE5.5
2000	-	Netscape 6.2 & Firefox 1 with JS 1.5
2008	ES4	ECMAScript 4 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 (Harmony) released
2016–2018	ES6	Full ES6 support across all major browsers

Notes

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

ECMA Technical Committee 39 (TC39)

In 1996, Netscape and Brendan Eich took JavaScript to the ECMA international standards organization, where Technical Committee 39 (TC39) was formed to develop the language further.

In 2008, during a TC39 meeting in Oslo to discuss ECMAScript 4, two opposing camps formed:

ECMAScript 3.1 Camp: Microsoft and Yahoo — preferred small, incremental upgrades.
ECMAScript 4 Camp: Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and Google — wanted a major upgrade.

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

ECMAScript 4 was dropped and rebranded as ES5.
ES5 became an incremental upgrade of ES3.
Some ES4 features were deferred to future releases.
Work began on ES6, codenamed Harmony.

ES5 was released in 2009 and quickly became a huge success, with all major browsers fully supporting it by 2013.