In 1993, Mosaic, the first popular web browser, came into existence. In the year 1994, Netscape was founded by Marc Andreessen. He realized that the web needed to become more dynamic. Thus, a ‘glue language’ was believed to be provided to HTML to make web designing easy for designers and part-time programmers. Consequently, in 1995, the company recruited Brendan Eich intending to implement and embed Scheme programming language to the browser.
But, before Brendan could start, the company merged with Sun Microsystems for adding Java into its Navigator so that it could compete with Microsoft over the web technologies and platforms. Now, two languages were there: Java and the scripting language. Further, Netscape decided to give a similar name to the scripting language as Java’s. It led to ‘Javascript’. Finally, in May 1995, Marc Andreessen coined the first code of Javascript named ‘Mocha‘. Later, the marketing team replaced the name with ‘LiveScript‘. But, due to trademark reasons and certain other reasons, in December 1995, the language was finally renamed to ‘JavaScript’. From then, JavaScript came into existence.
Application of JavaScript
JavaScript is used to create interactive websites. It is mainly used for:
- Client-side validation,
- Dynamic drop-down menus,
- Displaying date and time,
- Displaying pop-up windows and dialog boxes (like an alert dialog box, confirm dialog box and prompt dialog box),
- Displaying clocks etc.
JavaScript / ECMAScript
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).