Let me take you down memory lane.
In 1990, the internet got famous. Not many people knew about it or had access to the internet. Some companies asked people to make websites for them and these people were called the HTML AUTHORS, because they used to create web pages and design the pages with the help of content. These pages were static. Jumping from one page to another had to be done by hyperlinks, thus these websites weren't interactive.
In 1993, Mosaic came into the picture. It was a very good browser and everyone wanted to have Mosaic as their browser and that's where the developers of Mosaic decided to create a company and commercialise it. It resulted to NETSCAPE. However, Netscape had its own browser called Netscape Navigator. Then other companies decided to build their own browsers at this point. For instance, Microsoft built the Internet Explorer.
Netscape Navigator was however sold and Microsoft made Internet Explorer in the Windows OS and added a component called Free browser. There was competition and for Netscape to remain in market , they approached Sun Microsystem, to create awesome experience to users.
Sun Microsystem decided to create a new language. They hired Brendan Eich, a developer who was working on Scheme Language. He made a new language in ten days and called it Mocha. This language however had some bugs as well as awesome features.
During this period, Java was getting very famous. It wasn't publicly launched but it was used among developers.
While launching Mocha, the name was changed to LiveScript. The language was made in such a way that it could only be used in the Netscape Navigator, and for you to access the pages , you needed to purchase Netscape Navigator. They further renamed LiveScript to Javascript because Java was becoming increasingly prominent at this time. In 1995, Javascript was released in the new browser called Netscape Navigator and they started winning the competition.
Microsoft went on to introduce a new language called JScript. Remember, Javascript only worked on Netscape Navigator, however JScript worked on Internet Explorer which was free . As expected, most developers went for the free one, which is JScript.
Netscape began losing the competition again. They then went to ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association). Netscape decided to make Javascript a Standard Language. So this led to the creation of the ECMAScript. ECMAScript was created to standardize JavaScript.
The first part of ECMAScript was launched in 1997. And JavaScript became the main language. 3 years later, there was the third version of ECMAScript and Microsoft decided to also follow ECMAScript. However, something astonishing happened that year.
In 2000, the dot.com bubble burst. The entire tech market was going down. In fact, Netscape was so much in loss that AOL bought them. Before selling the company, Netscape took the source code of Netscape Navigator and they made it open source and the reincarnation of Netscape Navigator was the Firefox browser.
Back to ECMAScript, they launched ECMAScript 3.1 which had minor updates. ECMAScript 4 was not implemented in Javascript but a company called Micromedia came up with ActionScript which is ECMAScript 4.
In 2005, AJAX came with the concept of Single Page Application, SPA. In 2008, Google came up with their own browser and every browser had their own engine. Chrome brought the V8 Engine and Javascript files were both complied and interpreted via it. The Just In Time Compiler evolved.
Javascript became fast and easy, and it could be run directly on OS and this led to a new environment called node.js. Node.js is an engine or environment which has a Javascript engine. Using Node.js you can build application not just as a browser frontend but even desktop application, backend application etc. It is at this period that Javascript got its boost.
In the same year, 2009, we got ECMAScript and some called it a modern Javascript. In 2015, there was many new ECMAScript versions, however ECMAScript 66 is special because it introduced special features used by everyone. The nomenclature was later renamed after the year each version was released e.g. ES 2024.
JScript, Action script, etc got scrapped. And today, we use Javascript.