The History of JavaScript: From Netscape to ECMAScript

So basically, I started learning JavaScript in the 2nd semester of my college days. It was simple, just needed for some interactivity. At that time GPT-3 was launched. That worked for simple tasks.

After that, I tried to learn JS in depth. But it took a good amount of time before you actually understand it.

I have tried ChatGPT, Claude, YouTube, Medium articles, then thought let’s write myself. So I tried to explain it simply but it can be lengthy.

History of JavaScript

It was May 1995 and Netscape was in a hurry of releasing Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser. Netscape wanted a way to make websites “come alive” with dynamic features like validations, animations, and real-time updates.

There was a person named Brendan Eich who was an employee of Netscape. He created JavaScript (LiveScript at that time) in a record-breaking 10 days.

That was the main concern about the whole “WAT” (the most illogical parts of the language). Because at that time neither Claude Code, Codex, nor GitHub Copilot were available.

Now jokes aside, it is better in some terms; like hierarchical inheritance is better than Java and all others.

Now you might get a question as well: if Netscape created this and used it in their browser, what did their competitors use?

All of the other browsers created their own versions, like Microsoft created JScript for Internet Explorer 3.0. Before that, people were using Java Applets (if in the past you have studied Java you can relate, or else skip it).

Now one another question people get: why was it named JavaScript from LiveScript?

Only for marketing because there was a really big company named Sun Microsystems. For the creation of Netscape Navigator 2.0, Netscape & Sun Microsystems were partners. Sun Microsystems owned Java and Java was very popular, so they changed its name to JavaScript. Point to be noted that Sun Microsystems was later acquired by Oracle and now Oracle holds rights for both Java as well as JavaScript.

In that era, if you wanted to make your website interactive you would write JavaScript for one, JScript for the other. Similar to how it is hard to make applications for cross-platforms.

To stop the language from splitting into completely incompatible versions, Netscape submitted it to Ecma International in 1996. This created a neutral “blueprint” called ECMAScript that all browser vendors—including Apple, Google, and Microsoft—could follow to ensure websites worked everywhere.

Because JavaScript was the only language built directly into the major browsers (unlike Java or Flash which required plugins), it became the “default” choice for developers. As more developers built sites using it, new browsers (like Safari in 2003 and Chrome in 2008) had no choice but to support it to be compatible with the existing web.

Now one other question you may get will be like: we understand that it was created in a hurry, but after that why did it not get fixed?

The answer is backward compatibility. If you change versions like JS 6 to JS 7, all existing websites will break. So for that only reason, it does not get fixed. Instead of deleting bad features, the ECMAScript committee adds better versions of them. e.g., the introduction of let and const.

Why JavaScript feels a complete mess?

Because it was built in a hurry, it lacks a logical standard library (e.g., it has no built-in “integer” type—everything is a decimal).

Fragmentation: There are 4 million ways to do the same thing, leading to “JavaScript Fatigue” where you have to relearn your tools every few months.

Silent Failures: Unlike other languages that crash when they see an error, JavaScript often tries to “help” by guessing what you meant, which usually results in silent, weird bugs.