Deno finally sees the light of day with its first public release. It’s still not clear whether it’s going to become the next big thing but the hopes are high.

The SpaceX Dragon launch brings JavaScript to space! The Dragon 2 flight interface was built using Chromium and JavaScript along with C++ for flight computers.

Both proposals were moved to stage 4. The language syntax was extended with two new operators ?. and ?? which help to write safer code.

Sophie Alpert, Dan Abramov, and Ryan Florence define the problems with “wrapper hell, huge components and confusing classes” and introduce React hooks as a solution

Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, gives a talk at JSConf EU 2018 and introduces Deno, a new runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. The talk is called 10 Things I Regret About Node.js and is still available on YouTube.

Christopher Chedeau and James Long publish a blog post about Prettier 1.0 release.
“It started as an experiment but it clearly resonated with a lot of people, amassing ~7000 GitHub stars and over 100,000 monthly npm downloads in just two months.”

Maggie Johnson-Pint proposes Temporal, a global Object that acts as a top-level namespace and brings a modern date/time API to ECMAScript

The same team that built AngularJS rewrites it and introduces Angular 2, written in TypeScript.
At this point, quite a few teams have abandoned AngularJS in favor of libraries like React. Some developers even wrote break-up letters to their once-beloved framework.

The repository contains information about the stages of proposals to ECMAScript

This update includes arrow function expressions, let and const keywords, class declaration, promises, generators, and many other improvements.
Starting from this edition, ECMAScript will also get regular updates each year.

Sebastian McKenzie starts a new project to help with converting the new version of ECMAScript into versions that older JavaScript engines can process

“I figured, what if I could just extract the part that I really liked about Angular and build something really lightweight without all the extra concepts involved? I was also curious as to how its internal implementation worked. I started this experiment just trying to replicate this minimal feature set, like declarative data binding. That was basically how Vue started.”

GitHub develops Atom Shell, a framework that will later be renamed to Electron. The goal is to “create a straightforward framework that will allow people to use web technologies to build cross-platform desktop apps with all of the native trimmings.”

Tom Occhino and Jordan Walke introduce React at JSConf US 2013. React becomes an open-source project.
The audience at the conference is skeptical. Some people think that React is a huge step backward. This happened because most of the conference attendees were “early adopters” and “early majority”, while React was targeted at “innovators”.

After 2 years of internal development, Microsoft introduces a JavaScript superset called TypeScript. They developed TypeScript in an attempt to make JavaScript useful for large-scale development.
The first impressions of TypeScript were controversial. For example, Miguel de Icaza highlighted a number of advantages but also raised concerns about the lack of support for TypeScript in tooling other than Microsoft Visual Studio.

webpack, a new static module bundler for JavaScript applications, is introduced

WebKit Remote Debugging marks a new era for mobile browser debugging. It later becomes the Chrome DevTools Protocol

The 32-bit version of IE 9 gets a new JScript engine named Chakra, which converts JScript into machine code before running it

Previously known under its working name of Web IDE, WebStorm 1.0 is released with support for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Isaac Schlueter invents a new package manager for JavaScript

Using version 3.1 as a starting point, ECMAScript gets revamped after a very long break. The new version includes such important features as strict mode, getters and setters, and JSON support.

Ryan Dahl gives a talk at JSConf 2009 and introduces Node.js, a JavaScript runtime built on top of Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. The hypothetical JavaScript Everywhere paradigm becomes a reality.

To “help drive innovation on the web”, Google launches the beta version of Google Chrome, along with a new JavaScript engine, V8. The announcement is accompanied by this comic book.

“It’s no secret that the JavaScript standards body, Ecma’s Technical Committee 39, has been split for over a year, with some members favoring ES4, a major fourth edition to ECMA-262, and others advocating ES3.1 based on the existing ECMA-262 Edition 3 (ES3) specification. Now, I’m happy to report, the split is over.”

W3C publishes the specification for the 5th major revision of HTML

Steve Jobs introduces the first iPhone. The phone uses a mobile version of the Safari browser and has no support for Adobe Flash Player. Later, Jobs shares his thoughts on Flash and reveals the reasons behind the decision not to support it.

John Resig makes the initial release of jQuery, a JavaScript library that makes it easier to navigate and manipulate the HTML DOM

Apple announces the immediate availability of the WebKit Open Source Project, their fork of KHTML

Deb Richardson joins Mozilla Corporation and launches the initial Mozilla Developer Network in March 2005