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Eventually, Microsoft won the browser wars and Internet Explorer emerged as the domin-
ant browser. Support for standards had also increased, helped largely by the efforts of the
Web Standards Project (WaSP). Developer and browser vendors started to work together
and embrace the standards laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and ECMA.
The open source web browser Firefox debuted in 2002 and Apple launched the Safari
browser in 2003. These both had strong standards support, which meant that developers
were able to produce better web applications using JavaScript that behaved consistently
across different browsers.
Web 2.0
In 2005, sites such as Google Maps, Flickr, and Gmail started to appear and successfully
demonstrated that JavaScript was capable of creating rich internet applications that looked
and behaved like native desktop applications. At around the same time, the term
Ajax
,
short for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, was coined by Jesse James Garrett. This de-
scribed a technique of obtaining data from a server in the background and updating only
the relevant parts of the web page without the need for a full page reload, enabling the user
to still interact with the rest of the page. This created a more seamless experience for users
where it was used extensively in many Web 2.0 applications. As a result a lot of profes-
sional programmers took more notice of JavaScript and it began to be seen as a powerful
and flexible programming language, capable of producing high-quality code.
Standards
As JavaScript became used for more sophisticated applications and browsers embraced
standards, the JavaScript landscape changed. A new browser war started, but this time it
was about seeing which browser could be the most standards-compliant. There has also
been competition to increase the speed of the JavaScript engine that is built into the dif-
ferent browsers. This started in 2008 when engineers at Google developed the V8 engine
to run inside the Chrome browser. It was significantly faster than previous JavaScript en-
gines and signalled another arms race as other browser vendors responded by increasing
the speed of their engines. JavaScript now runs significantly faster in modern browsers and
the pace of improvement shows no sign of slowing down.
