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Right, but even worse since we didn't have multi tab browsers yet. So much usage of early JS on the web was simply malicious, and JS had a bad reputation for y

Right, but even worse since we didn't have multi tab browsers yet. So much usage of early JS on the web was simply malicious, and JS had a bad reputation for years. Many would even disable JS completely. Amazing how AJAX was able to save JS on the web.

isolli 7y ago
How did AJAX save JS? I would be interested in reading about that!
- codesushi42 7y ago
  Mainly because updating a page without a refresh was novel. Then developers began exploring how they could manipulate the page in response, using the DOM. The need for DOM manipulation led to a lot of early JS frameworks-- scriptaculous, then eventually YUI and jQuery afterwards. The explosion of clientside code in the browser also led to the V8 engine; before that, JS was far too slow for web apps to seriously compete with desktop apps. But before all of that, JS was hated by both end users and developers. It did not have much use outside of dropdown navigation, image maps, and plenty of malicious (or at least annoying) client-side hacks (alert box spamming, popups, disabled back buttons, etc). It was not uncommon for users to have JS completely disabled. You needed to design sites knowing some significant percentage of users could not run your JS.
  - fps_doug 7y ago
    The improvements in JS performance over time is crazy. I was an Opera user (started with 5.x IIRC) and its JS engine was pretty slow. I mean so slow that even in the early 2000s some pages with just a few animations were annoying to use and better viewed in IE. Then at some point they rewrote the engine from scratch and also implemented JIT compilation to machine code. Opera might even have been the first browser to do so. After that it was lightning fast, ahead of IE, Firefox and Chrome before Blink/V8. If you use the last Presto Build of Opera today, those pages that still manage to render at all and use heavy JS are painfully sluggish, close to unusable. Opera's JS engine rewrite felt like performance was suddenly IE times 10. Now it feels like Chrome/Firefox are Opera Presto times 100.
  - dbtx 7y ago
    > You needed to design sites knowing some significant percentage of users could not run your JS. Off-topic: if "everyone knows" this is no longer the case, then this statement about the new case is disappointing. It implies that the percentage of users who bother about privacy and security on the web is now insignificant, so nobody actually needs to consider them anymore, and nobody will, and things will just keep on breaking and staying broken.
  - dasil003 7y ago
    There was also a whole scene of demo-like JS for years before XHR and serious use of JS... dig through http://www.ozones.com/ http://www.ozones.com/ for some cool 90s era JS hackery.
- pjc50 7y ago
  It enabled genuine "web apps"; I think the first one I used that was really different from a static web page was Google Maps. Apparently that was 2005, I'd be interested to see other people's comments on the first really useful AJAX app.
  - tomlong 7y ago
    The first common usage I remember was type-ahead autofill search suggestion type things (on google.com iirc). Such a small commonplace thing now, but it was pretty impressive at the time.
  - ido 7y ago
    I thought it was Gmail?
  - meigwilym 7y ago
    The first I saw of functionality like this was editing the titles of images on Flickr. I still remember the amazement I felt when I could click on the text, give it a new name, save, and all without having to load a single form.

isolli 7y ago

How did AJAX save JS? I would be interested in reading about that!

codesushi42 7y ago
Mainly because updating a page without a refresh was novel. Then developers began exploring how they could manipulate the page in response, using the DOM. The need for DOM manipulation led to a lot of early JS frameworks-- scriptaculous, then eventually YUI and jQuery afterwards. The explosion of clientside code in the browser also led to the V8 engine; before that, JS was far too slow for web apps to seriously compete with desktop apps. But before all of that, JS was hated by both end users and developers. It did not have much use outside of dropdown navigation, image maps, and plenty of malicious (or at least annoying) client-side hacks (alert box spamming, popups, disabled back buttons, etc). It was not uncommon for users to have JS completely disabled. You needed to design sites knowing some significant percentage of users could not run your JS.
- fps_doug 7y ago
  The improvements in JS performance over time is crazy. I was an Opera user (started with 5.x IIRC) and its JS engine was pretty slow. I mean so slow that even in the early 2000s some pages with just a few animations were annoying to use and better viewed in IE. Then at some point they rewrote the engine from scratch and also implemented JIT compilation to machine code. Opera might even have been the first browser to do so. After that it was lightning fast, ahead of IE, Firefox and Chrome before Blink/V8. If you use the last Presto Build of Opera today, those pages that still manage to render at all and use heavy JS are painfully sluggish, close to unusable. Opera's JS engine rewrite felt like performance was suddenly IE times 10. Now it feels like Chrome/Firefox are Opera Presto times 100.
- dbtx 7y ago
  > You needed to design sites knowing some significant percentage of users could not run your JS. Off-topic: if "everyone knows" this is no longer the case, then this statement about the new case is disappointing. It implies that the percentage of users who bother about privacy and security on the web is now insignificant, so nobody actually needs to consider them anymore, and nobody will, and things will just keep on breaking and staying broken.
- dasil003 7y ago
  There was also a whole scene of demo-like JS for years before XHR and serious use of JS... dig through http://www.ozones.com/ http://www.ozones.com/ for some cool 90s era JS hackery.
pjc50 7y ago
It enabled genuine "web apps"; I think the first one I used that was really different from a static web page was Google Maps. Apparently that was 2005, I'd be interested to see other people's comments on the first really useful AJAX app.
- tomlong 7y ago
  The first common usage I remember was type-ahead autofill search suggestion type things (on google.com iirc). Such a small commonplace thing now, but it was pretty impressive at the time.
- ido 7y ago
  I thought it was Gmail?
- meigwilym 7y ago
  The first I saw of functionality like this was editing the titles of images on Flickr. I still remember the amazement I felt when I could click on the text, give it a new name, save, and all without having to load a single form.