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This is perhaps a good example of how sometimes you can't force the hand of progress, it simply takes some time. So many ideas that were novel additions to Java
by Etheryte 6y ago
This is perhaps a good example of how sometimes you can't force the hand of progress, it simply takes some time. So many ideas that were novel additions to Javascript at the time but are standard practice in one form or another today. The touted reason for its failure was lack of backwards compatibility, but I can't help but wonder how much of it was simply browser wars and different factions refusing to cooperate. In 2008, Internet Explorer still held majority of the web, Firefox was a big player and Chrome had just barely entered the scene.
- whatatita 6y agoI also wonder that. IE is famously non-compliant when it comes to web standards and they were a big player back then. Chrome gained a lot of it's early traction by being quick to adopt new technologies. I wonder if it was also to do with the dramatic increate in the size of the spec. ES4 would have added so many more concepts I can't help but think thebrowsers would have nather not gone to all the effort.
- goatlover 6y agoIt's safe to guess that if Netscape had won in the 90s, JS and the browser would have progressed much farther in the 2000s. Microsoft was in it to stop the browser being used as a platform that threatened their monopoly. Once everyone was using IE, they had little incentive need to improve it.
- snek 6y agoOne of the biggest issues was that stakeholders were uncomfortable with having to ship their browsers with multiple engines to handle different versions of JS (or having to build one engine which could efficiently switch between all the features of different versions).