History of JavaScript, 1995 to 2025.

history of JavaScript

• A Brief History of JavaScript
• 2025-05-22
• By Deno.
• https://deno.com/blog/history-of-javascript

JavaScript history milestones.

based on the article by deno, omitting some, with my own experience and articles.

• 1994-12
• Netscape releases Netscape Navigator

• 1995-05
• Brendan Eich wrote JavaScript, in 10 days.
• The Story of JavaScript, by Brendan Eich

• 1995-12
• Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript. It explicitly said they planned to publish the draft specification that same month and make a source code reference implementation available for royalty-free licensing.

• NETSCAPE AND SUN ANNOUNCE JAVASCRIPT, THE OPEN, CROSS-PLATFORM OBJECT SCRIPTING LANGUAGE FOR ENTERPRISE NETWORKS AND THE INTERNET
• 28 INDUSTRY-LEADING COMPANIES TO ENDORSE JAVASCRIPT AS A COMPLEMENT TO JAVA FOR EASY ONLINE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
• https://web.archive.org/web/20070916144913/https://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease67.html

• 1996-03
• Netscape Navigator 2.0 is released with JavaScript 1.0.

• 1996-03
• Microsoft introduces JScript in Internet Explorer 3 to compete with Netscape Navigator

• 1997-06
• ECMAScript language specification published.

• 1998-01
• Netscape struggles, open sources Navigator, creating The Mozilla Project
• Netscape Browser Sucks (2002)

• 1999-03
• XMLHttpRequest is in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5. Shipped as an ActiveX object in IE5 in 1999. It was created by Microsoft for Outlook Web Access. XMLHttpRequest is written by prototyped Alex Hopmann and rewritten by Shawn Bracewell.

• The Story of XMLHTTP
• 2025
• By Alex Hopmann
• https://www.alexhopmann.com/page/the-story-of-xmlhttp

• 1999-12
• ECMAScript 3 is released with do-while, regex, new string methods (concat, match, replace, slice, split), exception handling, and more

• 2001-04
• JSON created. By Douglas Crockford.
• JSON Data Format

• 2002-06
• JSLint is created. A JavaScript syntax checker. By Douglas Crockford.

• 2002-09
• Mozilla releases Phoenix 0.1, precursor to Firefox.

• 2003-01
• Apple creates Safari browser (the WebKit engine, borrowed from KHTML engine of linux KDE.)

• 2004-04
• Google Gmail begin.

• 2005-02
• Jargon AJAX was created, by Jesse James Garrett in his company blog “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications”. The term became a craze.

• 2005-03
• The Mozilla Corporation launches DevMo By Mozilla, which becomes MDN.

• 2006-03
• jQuery is born. By John Resig.

• 2007-01
• Apple iPhone is released. Not supporting Flash.

• 2008-05
• book “JavaScript: The Good Parts” published. By Douglas Crockford.
• JavaScript the Good Parts, Douglas Crockford. 2008

• 2008-09
• Google Chrome browser is born. And the V8 engine.

• 2009-01
• CommonJS module system is started by Kevin Dangoor (Mozilla engineer).
• JS: CommonJS Module System (2009 to 2026)

• 2009
• AMD Module System is started by James Burke (creator of RequireJS and contributor to Dojo Toolkit).
• JS: AMD Module System and history (2009 to 2016)

• 2009-03
• Node.js is born. By Ryan Dahl.
• History of Node.js by Ryan Dahl 2011 📺
• Apache vs Node.js vs NGINX 📺. (2013 humor)

• 2009-06
• The first commit on Express.js is created

• 2009-12
• ECMAScript 5 adds a strict mode, getters and setters, new array methods, JSON support, string.trim(), trailing commas for object literals
• JS: Strict Mode

• 2009-12
• CoffeeScript is created. By Jeremy Ashkenas.
• CoffeeScript or JavaScript (2011)

• 2010-01
• npm is created. By Isaac Z. Schlueter

• 2010-10
• AngularJS by Miško Hevery.
• History of Angular.js (2018)

• 2010-10
• Backbone.js by Jeremy Ashkenas.

• 2011
• book “JavaScript The Definitive Guide” published. By David Flanagan. (aka the rhino book)
• JavaScript The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan. 2011, 2020.

• 2012-03
• Webpack, a module bundler, is born.

• 2012-10
• TypeScript is born.
• TypeScript Will Kill CoffeeScript and Dart (2012)

• 2013-03
• Mozilla releases asm.js

• 2013-03
• Atom Shell JavaScript framework created, from Atom editor, by github. (later renamed to Electron)
• Why was Electron Created (JavaScript framework, 2013)

• 2013-05
• Facebook releases React. Written by Jordan Walke.

• 2013-06
• Work on ESLint begins. By Nicholas C. Zakas.
• Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 2012, by Nicholas C Zakas

• 2013-07
• Gulp js. A task runner. By Eric Schoffstall.

• 2014-02
• Vue.js created. By Evan You. A web framework.

• 2014-09
• Babel.js is created. By Sebastian McKenzie. Its a js compiler.
• Stackoverflow dolts on JavaScript Compiler ES2015 to ES5. (Babel.js) (2014)

• 2014-10
• Meteor reaches 1.0
• Meteor (web framework)

• 2014-11
• Facebook launches Flow, a static type checker for JavaScript

• 2014-11
• Amazon announces AWS Lambda, powered by Node.js
• AWS Lambda

• 2015-09
• GraphQL, a query language for APIs, is launched
• GraphQL

• 2015-06
• Redux is released
• Redux (software)

• 2015-06
• Web assembly is released
• WebAssembly

• 2015-06
• Atom, a “hackable” text editor, is released

• 2015-07
• ECMAScript 6 (ES2015) is released
• JS: ECMAScript 2015

• January 2016
• Microsoft open sources Edge's Chakra JavaScript engine.
• Chakra (JavaScript engine)

• March 2016
• Azer Koculu removes Leftpad from npm, inadvertently leading to a supply chain attack on the order of millions of users impacted
• Npm left-pad incident

• April 2016
• Microsoft releases VSCode 1.0, a lightweight, fast, cross-platform IDE
• Emacs vs vsCode Memory (2021)
• Emacs: Open in vscode 📜

• June 2016
• ECMAScript 2016 is released, with exponential operator (**) and array.includes() method
• JS: ECMAScript 2016

• September 2016
• Angular (Angular2) is released

• October 2016
• Next.js 1.0 is released. By Guillermo Rauch, Tim Neutkens, Naoyuki Kanezawa, Arunoda Susiripala, Tony Kovanen, Dan Zajdband.
• Next.js

• March 2017
• The initial commit for the Temporal proposal is created

• April 2017
• Prettier 1.0 is released. format JS code, and HTML, CSS.

• June 2017
• ECMAScript 2017 is released with string padding, Object.entries(), Object.values(), async functions, and more
• JS: ECMAScript 2017

• September 2017
• Facebook launches Yarn, a new package manager

• September 2017
• Cloudflare launches Cloudflare Workers, allowing developers to run JavaScript at the edge

• January 2018
• Google releases Puppeteer. A headless browser, website testing automation tool.

• March 2018
• TensorFlow.js is released, bringing machine learning to the browser via WebGL or WebGPU without needing compute

• June 2018
• ECMA TC39 “Smooshgate” is resolved by renaming flatten to flat.
• JS: Array.prototype.flat

• June 2018
• Ryan Dahl made a video on regrets about Node, and announces the deno project.

• October 2018
• ECMAScript 2018 is released with rest/spread properties, async iteration, promise.finally(), and more
• JS: ECMAScript 2018

• July 2019
• ECMAScript 2019 is released with Object.fromEntries(), String.prototype.trimStart() and more
• JS: ECMAScript 2019

• November 2019
• Node.js stabilizes support for ECMAScript modules in v13.2.0
• JS: Module

• May 2020
• JavaScript makes it into space with SpaceX Dragon

• May 2020
• Deno 1.0 is released
• Deno: Intro

• December 2020
• Adobe sunset its Flash software, ending an era of videos and games that left an impression on internet culture

• June 2022
• Internet Explorer 11 is retired

• September 2023
• Bun is created, by Jarred Sumner. (a nodejs replacement. It uses Safari's JavaScriptCore as its JavaScript engine)

• June 2024
• ECMAScript 2024 is released, featuring the toWellFormed() method for return well-formed Unicode strings, and more
• JS: ECMAScript 2024

• March 2024
• JSR, a modern, open sourced JavaScript registry, is released

• October 2024
• Deno 2 is released
• Deno Logo

• 2025-05
• TypeScript is ported to Go
• TypeScript/JavaScript vs Golang (2025)