The early development or evolution of JavaScript is attributed to Brendan Eich & Netscape Corporation. Netscape Navigator was one of the most widely used and popular browsers in the 1990s.

In the initial days of the internet, web browsers were mere static and lacked interactive features (the way we see them today). With this in mind, the company kicked off a couple of initiatives to develop a solution for dynamic browsers.

In 1995, Netscape engaged Brendan Eich to leverage Scheme programming language (a variant of Lisp from the 1970s) into a scripting language that could be used to make the web pages dynamic and event responsive.

Netscape also collaborated with Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle in 2009) with the intent of embedding the Java Programming Language in Netscape Navigator. As Java was the most popular language at that time, it was a sort of de-facto default for all new initiatives. Sun wasn’t able to deliver the required deliverable.

Eventually, Netscape decided to go with Brendan Eich but also keep the new language syntactically and semantically close to Java as much as possible for the aforesaid reasons. As such, they kept the name JavaScript even though the initial program version that Brendan submitted was named LiveScript, and JavaScript and Java are completely different from each other.

Microsoft also launched its own browser – Internet Explorer in the same year – 1995. It also came up with its own scripting language called JScript, specific for IE (Internet Explorer).

As Microsoft dominated the desktop and office platforms for almost a decade (1995 to early 2000s), JavaScript was limited to Netscape (whose market share fell below 5% by the beginning of 2000) and didn’t get a standard adoption, while JScript became more popular. Also, Microsoft deviated away from ECMA standardization and adopted its own code framework.

JavaScript and JScript were a bit different and it was difficult to code a web page that would render equally both in IE and Netscape. As such, during that time(1995-2008), web pages were branded as “best viewed in Internet Explorer” & “best viewed in Netscape”. Due to a lack of a standard web scripting language and the “browser war” that existed, coders would have to learn browser-specific scripting.

Netscape lost the browser war and was eventually disbanded in 2003 after being acquired by AOL and later sold to Microsoft and then finally to Facebook under the brand New Aurora Corporation. Prior to being disbanded, Netscape created a new company called Mozilla Foundation to take a lead in open source development and also cater to the future development of products offered by Netscape.

Mozilla released its own browser – Firefox which gained wide popularity and also took away considerable market share from IE. Mozilla released several new technologies and libraries for web development like Ajax, JQuery, etc all of which were based on JavaScript. As such, JavaScript started becoming popular again by mid of the 2000s. Also when Google launched Chrome in 2008 which was based on a variant of JavaScript, it was felt the need to have a standard programming language that would fit all browsers. By 2009, it was agreed to use ECMAScript standards for web scripting and that all browsers must conform to its prescribed standards.

Today each browser has its own JavaScript implementation, meaning the internal code would be different for each browser, but functionality-wise all would be identical as they need to conform to ECMAScript standards.

As Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, hence they acquired Java, and hence the trademark “JavaScript” is now owned by Oracle Corporation, since Netscape when first launched the initial release of JavaScript, it was so done in collaboration with Sun Microsystem to use the “Java” tag.

It would be more prudent to call JavaScript ECMAScript 😀