At the same time work was underway on a new ECMAScript standard, at which point it became much more common to start referring to JavaScript implementations in terms of their support for different ECMAScript standards. There was more of a push to stop supporting old Internet Explorer versions, and writing code in ECMAScript 5 (ES5) style became much more feasible. Even after ECMAScript 5 was published in 2009, it took several years for wide browser support of the new spec, and most developers continued to write code in ECMAScript 3 style, without necessarily being aware of the standard.Īround 2012 things started to change. Instead various browser vendors made their own custom extensions to the language, and web developers were left to try and support multiple APIs. But after ECMASCript 3 came out in 1999, there were no changes made to the official standard for a decade. After the initial version of ECMAScript, work on the language continued and two more versions were quickly published. This has mostly been trivia for JavaScript developers, because ECMAScript didn’t change much for the first 15 years of its existence, and real world implementations often differed significantly from the standard. In the real world ECMAScript is usually used to refer to the standard while JavaScript is used when talking about the language in practice. All major JavaScript implementations since have actually been implementations of the ECMAScript standard, but the term JavaScript has stuck for historical and marketing reasons 1.

This eventually resulted in a new language standard, labeled ECMAScript. In 1996 Netscape submitted JavaScript to ECMA International for standardization.

For its initial release in 1995 as part of Netscape Navigator, Netscape labeled their new language LiveScript, before renaming it to JavaScript a year later, hoping to capitalize on Java’s popularity at the time ( JavaScript has no actual relationship to Java). Herding Lions Subscribe Articles Micro Blog About Me Currently Readingīen McCormick ES5, ES6, ES2016, ES.Next: What's going on with JavaScript versioning?

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