It was called JScript. It was released after JavaScript.
I am a peaceful man; never been in a fight with anybody, and oppose the death penalty. The exception is that I think all the people responsible for this clusterfuck of names should be shot.
J++ was a 'clone' of Java https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B . Sun sued Microsoft, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/sun-microsoft-settle...
and that's how .Net was born ( with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J_Sharp to ensure transition)
It was a stressful time to be a non-MS user back then, so I blame Post-Microsoft-Stress-Disorder.
Javascript came out in 1995, JScript in 1996, the ECMAScript standardization began in 1997 and the first release is from 1998
They reverse engineered the language and named it differently because they had no rights over JavaScript at the time
And good lord they did it, they could have adopted another language as the default one (they had VBScript too) and the story of the front end programming could have been very different.
Even MS is not evil all the time
The story I heard was that it was the Java trademark that was a bigger problem for Microsft naming it JavaScript. But that's somewhat irrelevant as you're right about the more important point about how JScript was reverse engineered from JavaScript.
> Even MS is not evil all the time
There was a lot of differences Microsoft introduced in JScript and as you said, Netscape submitted Javascript to ECMA for standardisation only a year later yet MS still pushed ahead with IE-specific language features to lock people into IE.
This was a common stunt Microsoft pulled back in those days. Microsoft even had a term for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Yeah, they all did though.
I was doing frontend dev back then, if we can call it that, it was web development with some JS actually or DHTML for those who remember.
Scripting elements was very limited at the beginning, you couldn't access the entire DOM, only forms and images, if I remember correctly, and maybe the decoration of links, that's how the hover behaviour was born.
The story is quite more nuanced, there's also the fact that IE was actually a better browser than Netscape after the Netscape 4 fiasco (I was a paying customer of Netscape 3 gold and Netscape 4)
Netscape tried the non-standard layer element accessible through document.layers (all the layout was done with tables back then, so this looked like an improvement) but didn't catch up.
IE 4 had a lot more features, it introduced document.all to access the entire DOM by ID, documents.forms, document.images, document.all.tags() that allowed the access to all tags by tag name, it introduced innerHTML, outerHTML, innerText and outerText properties.
It's easy to understand why developers switched to IE, given also that Windows was the primary platform that users used to browse the web (do we still use the browse verb?) and IE4 was available on the Mac too. IE5 introduced the XMLHttpRequest object so AJAX was born (IE 5 on Mac was even more advanced than the one on Windows)
And yes, MS abused of their dominant position with IE6, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that they actually innovated in the field, before abusing of it.
EDIT: it wasn't called XmlHttpRequest on IE, you had to instantiate an Activex Object (COM component) the MSXML2.XMLHttp. Forefox came up with the XmlHttpRequest name later (XML was still going strong at the time). You could actually instantiate any Activex component available on the client machine from IE >= 5, even Word if you wanted to.
I remember developing intranets for Windows networks where we used Word automation from the browser using Activex.
To think about it now it was a terrible idea, but it looked like a miracle back then. You could instantiate the ADODB COM component and run queries from the browser to the SQL server.
Agreed Netscape also introduced their own incompatibilities too, but Netscape didn’t have a desktop monopoly. Though I do agree that IE4 was actually a really good product. If I recall correctly even IE3 loaded pages quicker than Netscape Navigator 3.
I really wanted to like Netscape Communicator but it was hard to overlook just how sluggish it was compared to IE.
As for front end development, I mostly an sysadmin back then but I did have a few websites live (my first being publish in 1994). I even won in the JavaScript category of Planet Source Code (remember that place?) one month for a recreation of the Windows desktop using JS. But I much preferred writing desktop software to web pages (and I still don’t really enjoy frontend dev all that much even now)
Not only are many .NET bindings for Win32, largely based on top of COM, WinDev has doubled down on COM since they rebooted Longhorn ideas into Windows Vista, and WinRT is nothing more than COM with another set of additional interfaces (TL;DR version, it is a bit more actually).
You could also use VBScript in the browser if you wanted to, it's been an option up to IE 11
IE had pluggable scripting engines, which wasn't a bad idea per se and anyone could write one, it was a simple COM component
They provided the best Perl distribution for Windows.
They also made some cool IDE/Editor based on Mozilla XUL.