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).

Note

* Internet Explorer 9 did not support ES5 "use strict".

** Internet Explorer 11 does not support ES6.

The ECMA Technical Committee 39

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

ECMA-262 Edition 1 was released in June 1997.

From ES4 to ES6

When the TC39 committee got together in Oslo in 2008, to agree on ECMAScript 4, they were divided into 2 very different camps:

The ECMAScript 3.1 Camp:
Microsoft and Yahoo who wanted an incremental upgrade from ES3.

The ECMAScript 4 Camp:
Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and Google who wanted a massive ES4 upgrade.

August 13 2008, Brendan Eich wrote an email:

It's no secret that the JavaScript standards body, Ecma's Technical Committee 39, has been split for over a year, with some members favoring ES4, a major fourth edition to ECMA-262, and others advocating ES3.1 based on the existing ECMA-262 Edition 3 (ES3) specification. Now, I'm happy to report, the split is over.

The solution was to work together:

• ECMAScript 4 was renamed to ES5
• ES5 should be an incremental upgrade of ECMAScript 3.
• Features of ECMAScript 4 should be picked up in later versions.
• TC39 should develop a new major release, bigger in scope than ES5.

The planned new release (ES6) was codenamed "Harmony" (Because of the split it created?).

ES5 was a huge success. It was released in 2009, and all major browsers (including Internet Explorer) were fully compliant by July 2013: