Editing JavaScript (section)

=== The rise of JScript ===
{{Quote box|[[Brendan Eich]] later said of this period: "It's still kind of a [[sidekick]] language. It's considered slow or annoying. People do [[Pop-up ad|pop-ups]] or those scrolling messages in the old [[status bar]] at the bottom of your old [[web browser|browser]]."<ref name="EichVideo" />|width=30%}}

In November 1996, [[Netscape]] submitted JavaScript to [[Ecma International]], as the starting point for a standard specification that all browser vendors could conform to. This led to the official release of the first [[ECMAScript]] language specification in June 1997.

The standards process continued for a few years, with the release of ECMAScript 2 in June 1998 and ECMAScript 3 in December 1999. Work on ECMAScript 4 began in 2000.<ref name="sjsch5" />

However, the effort to fully standardize the language was undermined by Microsoft gaining an increasingly dominant position in the browser market. By the early 2000s, [[Internet Explorer]]'s market share reached 95%.<ref name="searchenginejournal.com">{{cite news | url=https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-internet-browser-market-share-gains-to-74/1082/ | title=Mozilla Firefox Internet Browser Market Share Gains to 7.4% | first=Loren | last=Baker | work=Search Engine Journal | date=November 24, 2004 | access-date=May 8, 2021 | archive-date=May 7, 2021 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210507013607/https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-internet-browser-market-share-gains-to-74/1082/ | url-status=live }}</ref> This meant that [[JScript]] became the de facto standard for [[client-side scripting]] on the Web.

Microsoft initially participated in the standards process and implemented some proposals in its JScript language, but eventually it stopped collaborating on ECMA work. Thus ECMAScript 4 was mothballed.