Tales of Tech Lore

In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet

Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all.

Benj Edwards – Dec 5, 2025 2:59 AM | 146

An early logo from the Netscape web browser that featured animated comets. Credit: Netscape / Benj Edwards

Thirty years ago today, Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems issued a joint press release announcing JavaScript, an object scripting language designed for creating interactive web applications. The language emerged from a frantic 10-day sprint at pioneering browser company Netscape, where engineer Brendan Eich hacked together a working internal prototype during May 1995.

While the JavaScript language didn’t ship publicly until that September and didn’t reach a 1.0 release until March 1996, the descendants of Eich’s initial 10-day hack now run on approximately 98.9 percent of all websites with client-side code, making JavaScript the dominant programming language of the web. It’s wildly popular; beyond the browser, JavaScript powers server backends, mobile apps, desktop software, and even some embedded systems. According to several surveys, JavaScript consistently ranks among the most widely used programming languages in the world.

In crafting JavaScript, Netscape wanted a scripting language that could make webpages interactive, something lightweight that would appeal to web designers and non-professional programmers. Eich drew from several influences: The syntax looked like a trendy new programming language called Java to satisfy Netscape management, but its guts borrowed concepts from Scheme, a language Eich admired, and Self, which contributed JavaScript’s prototype-based object model.

A screenshot of the Netscape Navigator 2.0 interface. Credit: Benj Edwards

The JavaScript partnership secured endorsements from 28 major tech companies, but amusingly, the December 1995 announcement now reads like a tech industry epitaph. The endorsing companies included Digital Equipment Corporation (absorbed by Compaq, then HP), Silicon Graphics (bankrupt), and Netscape itself (bought by AOL, dismantled). Sun Microsystems, co-creator of JavaScript and owner of Java, was acquired by Oracle in 2010. JavaScript outlived them all.

What’s in a name?

The 10-day creation story has become programming folklore, but even with that kernel of truth we mentioned, it tends to oversimplify the timeline. Eich’s sprint produced a working demo, not a finished language, and over the next year, Netscape continued tweaking the design. The rushed development left JavaScript with quirks and inconsistencies that developers still complain about today. So many changes were coming down the pipeline, in fact, that it began to annoy one of the industry’s most prominent figures at the time.

“Bill Gates was bitching about us changing JS all the time,” Eich later recalled of the fall of 1996. Microsoft created its own implementation called JScript for Internet Explorer, leading to years of browser incompatibility that plagued web developers.

Before finalizing on the title “JavaScript,” the language cycled through multiple names. Eich initially called his prototype “Mocha,” then Netscape renamed it LiveScript for the September 1995 beta release of Netscape 2.0. The JavaScript name arrived in December when Netscape and Sun finalized their partnership. “It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript,” Eich explained in a 2008 interview with InfoWorld. “And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript.”

That name has been a source of confusion for three decades. It was a marketing decision meant to capitalize on the buzz around Java at the time. The 1995 press release prominently positioned JavaScript as a complement to Java, with the former handling small client-side tasks while Java powered larger enterprise applications. Bill Joy, Sun’s co-founder and vice president of research, said at the time: “JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets.”

Confusion about its relationship to Java continues: The two languages share a name, some syntax conventions, and virtually nothing else. Java was developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems using static typing and class-based objects. JavaScript uses dynamic typing and prototype-based inheritance. The distinction between the two languages, as one Stack Overflow user put it in 2010, is similar to the relationship between the words “car” and “carpet.”

From coffee name to industry standard

Industry standardization of JavaScript arrived in June 1997 through ECMA International as ECMAScript (with “ECMA” being short for “European Computer Manufacturers Association”). The language went through a rocky period in the early 2000s, when Internet Explorer dominated the browser market and innovation stalled somewhat, but the 2005 introduction of AJAX revitalized interest by enabling smoother web applications without full page reloads. Node.js arrived in 2009, letting developers run JavaScript on servers, and the language’s scope expanded far beyond the browser.

Today, JavaScript appears across virtually every corner of web development. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey for 2024 found that 62 percent of developers use JavaScript, making it the single most popular programming language (web or otherwise) for the twelfth year running. JetBrains’ State of Developer Ecosystem Report placed JavaScript at 61 percent usage among surveyed developers, with TypeScript, a JavaScript superset that adds static typing, growing from 12 percent adoption in 2017 to 35 percent in 2024.

The language now powers not just websites but mobile applications through frameworks like React Native, desktop software through Electron, and server infrastructure through Node.js. Somewhere around 2 million to 3 million packages exist on npm, the JavaScript package registry.

Today, people want to free the JavaScript trademark for public use. Oracle inherited the mark when it acquired Sun Microsystems, but the company has never built a product using the JavaScript name. An open letter signed by Eich, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, and more than 28,000 members of the JavaScript community argues that Oracle has abandoned the trademark through non-use and that the term has become generic.

The group filed a petition for cancellation with the US Patent and Trademark Office in November 2024. Without risking a legal trademark challenge against Oracle, the letter notes, there can be no “JavaScript Conference” or “JavaScript Specification,” forcing community organizations to use awkward workarounds like “JSConf.” Eich himself wrote in 2006 that “ECMAScript,” the official name for the language standard, “was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease.”

Skin disease or not, the underlying language stuck around far longer than anyone expected. Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that Java applets largely vanished from browsers years ago, but JavaScript dominates. The freaky sideshow became the main event. Happy birthday, JavaScript.

Benj Edwards Senior AI Reporter

Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

146 Comments