Thirty years ago, JavaScript was conceived as a supplemental scripting language for web pages—a quick experiment assembled under tight deadlines by Netscape engineer Brendan Eich. What began as a rushed prototype, shaped by compromises and improvised decisions, has since become one of the world’s central programming languages, outliving its original creators and forming an ecosystem without which modern online services would be unimaginable. The history of JavaScript is a story of technological ambition, shifting alliances, browser rivalries and the unexpected resilience of a tool that was never meant to occupy center stage. This article explains how the language emerged, how it was standardized and why, three decades on, it continues to shape the evolution of the web.
Thirty years ago, Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems announced the arrival of JavaScript—an object-oriented scripting language designed for interactive web applications. It was born in haste: over just ten days in May 1995, Netscape engineer Brendan Eich put together a working internal prototype.
The public release came only in September, and version 1.0 followed in March 1996. Yet it was that original ten-day sketch that grew into a language now used on roughly 98.9 percent of websites with client-side code, becoming the web’s dominant tool. Its reach extends far beyond the browser—it powers server backends, mobile apps, desktop software and even some embedded systems. Surveys consistently place JavaScript among the world’s most in-demand programming languages.
In creating JavaScript, Netscape sought a lightweight scripting language that would make web pages interactive and accessible to web designers and non-professional developers. Eich drew on a range of influences: its syntax echoed Java—the then-fashionable language that Netscape’s leadership insisted on—but its underlying logic incorporated ideas from Scheme, which Eich admired, as well as from Self, the source of JavaScript’s prototype-based object model.
The partnership behind JavaScript won the backing of 28 major technology companies, yet the December 1995 press release now reads almost like an epitaph for the industry. Among those offering endorsements were Digital Equipment Corporation, later absorbed first by Compaq and then by HP; Silicon Graphics, which eventually went bankrupt; and Netscape itself, acquired by AOL and later dissolved. Sun Microsystems, co-developer of JavaScript and owner of Java, was bought by Oracle in 2010. JavaScript outlived them all.
How JavaScript Emerged and Why Its Early History Still Sparks Debate
The story that JavaScript was created in ten days has long been part of programming folklore. While it contains an element of truth, it greatly simplifies the reality. During that period, Eich assembled a working prototype rather than a finished language, and Netscape spent another year refining the architecture. The rush produced technical quirks and inconsistencies that continue to frustrate developers. The volume of changes grew so large that, by late 1996, it had begun to irritate one of the most influential figures in the industry.
“Bill Gates kept yelling at us because we were constantly changing JS,” Eich later recalled. Microsoft built its own implementation—JScript for Internet Explorer—which triggered years of browser incompatibilities and made life considerably harder for web developers.
Before settling on the name “JavaScript,” the language cycled through several others. Eich’s prototype was initially called “Mocha,” then renamed LiveScript for the beta release of Netscape 2.0 in September 1995. The name JavaScript appeared in December, when Netscape and Sun formalized their partnership. “From May to December 1995 things moved very fast: first it was Mocha, then LiveScript,” Eich explained in a 2008 interview with InfoWorld. “And then in early December Netscape and Sun reached a licensing deal, and the language became JavaScript.”
That name has been a source of confusion for three decades. It was a marketing decision aimed at riding the wave of excitement surrounding Java, which at the time was at the height of its popularity. In the 1995 press release, JavaScript was positioned as a complement to Java: the former was meant for small client-side tasks, while the latter was intended to power large-scale enterprise applications. Sun co-founder and vice president for research Bill Joy declared at the time: “JavaScript will be the most effective way to link HTML content with Java applets.”
The confusion surrounding the relationship between the two languages persists to this day: they share a name, a partially similar syntax—and almost nothing else. Java was created by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and relies on static typing and a class-based model. JavaScript, by contrast, is built on dynamic typing and prototype-based inheritance. As one Stack Overflow user memorably put it in 2010, the difference between them is roughly the same as between “car” and “carpet.”
How Standardization and New Technologies Turned JavaScript Into the Backbone of the Modern Internet
Industry standards for JavaScript emerged in June 1997, when ECMA International approved the ECMAScript specification (“ECMA” stood for “European Computer Manufacturers Association”). In the early 2000s the language entered a difficult phase: Internet Explorer dominated the browser market, and progress effectively stalled. But in 2005 the arrival of AJAX revived interest in JavaScript, enabling smoother web applications without full page reloads. The release of Node.js in 2009 brought JavaScript to servers, dramatically expanding where and how it could be used.
Today JavaScript is present in nearly every segment of web development. In the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 62 percent of developers reported using JavaScript, making it the most popular programming language—web-oriented or otherwise—for the twelfth consecutive year. In JetBrains’ State of Developer Ecosystem report, the language reached 61 percent among respondents, while TypeScript, a statically typed extension of JavaScript, grew from 12 percent adoption in 2017 to 35 percent in 2024.
Today JavaScript is used far beyond website development: through frameworks such as React Native it underpins mobile applications; through Electron it powers desktop software; and through Node.js it drives server infrastructure. By various estimates, npm—the registry of JavaScript packages—now contains between 2 and 3 million libraries.
Within the community, calls to make the JavaScript trademark publicly accessible have grown louder. Oracle acquired the rights to the mark when it bought Sun Microsystems, yet it has never released a product under the name JavaScript. In an open letter signed by Eich, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl and more than 28,000 community members, the authors argue that Oracle has effectively abandoned the trademark because it does not use it, while the term itself has become generic.
The group filed a petition to cancel the trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in November 2024. As long as the risk of litigation with Oracle remains, the letter’s authors note, it is impossible to hold a “JavaScript Conference” or publish a “JavaScript Specification,” forcing organizers to rely on workarounds such as “JSConf.” Eich himself wrote back in 2006 that the name “ECMAScript,” the language’s official standard, “was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin condition.”
Whatever one thinks of the name, the language itself has proved far more resilient than anyone imagined. The irony is that Java applets vanished from browsers many years ago, while JavaScript rose to dominance. What once looked like an odd experiment on the margins has become the main event. Happy birthday, JavaScript.