One thing that may not be obvious: On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 8:52 AM Brendan Eich <brendan.e...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I created JS in 1995. In 1996 I made a few incompatible changes to JS and > got away with it, but not in 1997. ES3 was done in 1999 based on de-facto > work in Netscape and IE that converged (mostly; a few edge cases) around > the same time, but even by 1998 the only way to coordinate was via the > ECMA-262 standards work, not just ES1 but the discussions about future work > we were having in 1997. > Netscape had effective monopoly control of JS in 1995 and into 1996, but was losing it by 1997 with IE4 coming out. No browser has it now, although Chrome has the most market power. Even monopolies cannot repeal price law -- they can only force deadweight losses on customers up to a limit where the customer does without, or else substitutes by going outside the monopoly system. With JS, there was risk at the limit of users going without JS. There was risk too, small at first but growing to large, of users substituting IE and even using VBScript instead of JS. Fortunately ;-), JS was first and good-enough, and standardized enough, to head off the VBScript substitution. So I couldn't just change JS any way I wanted based on market power. Nor can Chrome now, or in a future where it got closer to IE's top (2004?) share of 95% (per wikipedia). /be
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