JavaScript got its name as a marketing ploy, not from Java
Brendan Eich's new browser language first shipped in a Netscape beta in September 1995 as LiveScript. By the official release that December it had been renamed JavaScript, riding the hype around Sun's fashionable Java. Eich himself saw the name as a marketing ploy, and it has confused people ever since, because the two languages differ greatly in design.
In the mid-1990s web pages were static once loaded. Netscape, whose Navigator had become the most popular browser after Mosaic, wanted a 'language for the masses' that would let non-programmers build interactive sites. It pursued two paths at once: embedding Sun's Java, and hiring Eich to embed Scheme. Management then asked Eich to invent a new language instead, with syntax closer to Java than to Scheme.
Microsoft launched Internet Explorer in 1995 and built its own version, JScript, released in 1996. The two implementations differed enough that developers struggled to make sites work in both, and 'best viewed in Netscape' or 'best viewed in Internet Explorer' badges spread across the web. Netscape submitted the language to Ecma International in November 1996, and the first ECMAScript standard appeared in June 1997. But once Internet Explorer reached 95 percent market share in the early 2000s, Microsoft stopped cooperating, the ambitious ECMAScript 4 was shelved, and browser scripting stagnated.
Revival came from two directions. Mozilla's Firefox, released in 2004, won back substantial market share. And in 2005 Jesse James Garrett coined the term Ajax for techniques, built on JavaScript, that load data in the background without reloading the whole page. That sparked a burst of open-source libraries such as jQuery and Dojo Toolkit.
Today JavaScript is a core web technology alongside HTML and CSS, maintained by Ecma's TC39 committee. It is dynamically typed, supports event-driven, functional and imperative styles, and uses prototypes rather than classes for objects. The standard itself includes no input or output; browsers and runtimes such as Node.js supply those. It was GitHub's most used language in 2025 until its stricter, statically typed offshoot TypeScript overtook it that August.
Source: JavaScript
