This chapter contains information about JavaScript's version history and implementation status for Mozilla/SpiderMonkey-based JavaScript applications, such as Firefox.
The following is a changelog for JavaScript from Netscape Navigator 2.0 to 3.0. The old Netscape documentation references this as "Features added after version 1". Netscape Navigator 3.0 was released on August 19, 1996. Netscape Navigator 3.0 was the second major version of the browser with JavaScript support.
The following is a changelog for JavaScript from Netscape Navigator 3.0 to 4.0. The old Netscape documentation can be found on archive.org. Netscape Navigator 4.0 was released on June 11, 1997. Netscape Navigator 4.0 was the third major version of the browser with JavaScript support.
The following is a changelog for JavaScript from Netscape Navigator 4.0 to 4.5. The old Netscape documentation can be found on archive.org. Netscape Navigator 4.5 was released on October 19, 1998.
The following is a changelog for JavaScript 1.4, which was only used for Netscape's server side JavaScript released in 1999. The old Netscape documentation can be found on archive.org.
The following is a changelog for JavaScript 1.5. This version was included in Netscape Navigator 6.0 was released on November 14, 2000 and was also used in later versions of Netscape Navigator and Firefox 1.0. You can compare JavaScript 1.5 to JScript version 5.5 and Internet Explorer 5.5, which was released in July 2000. The corresponding ECMA standard is ECMA-262 Edition 3 (from December 1999).
The following is a changelog for JavaScript 1.6. This version was included in Firefox 1.5 (Gecko 1.8), which was released in November 2005. The corresponding ECMA standard is ECMA-262 Edition 3 and ECMAScript for XML (E4X) with some additional features. Several new features were introduced: E4X, several new Array methods, and Array and String generics.
The following is a changelog for JavaScript 1.8. This version was included in Firefox 3 and is part of Gecko 1.9. See bug 380236 for a tracking development bug for JavaScript 1.8.