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.[17]
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%.[21] 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.
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