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JavaScript

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Revision as of 06:58, 18 March 2026 by Rudxain (talk | contribs) (forgot to finish a sentence)
JavaScript
Basic Information
Release Year 1995
Product Type Software
In Production Yes
Official Website https://tc39.es/ecma262/multipage/

JavaScript (JS) is a programming language and core technology of the Web, alongside HTML and CSS. It was created by Brendan Eich in 1995.[1] As of 2025, the overwhelming majority of websites (98.9%) uses JS for client-side webpage behavior.[2] It's even used on the server-side (see Node.js).

Consumer-impact summary

  • Forced requirement: Many webpages (and even entire websites), force the user to keep JS enabled. In 2026, considering the advancements in HTML and CSS technology, there is no technical reason why any website (other than real-time simulations and low-latency gaming) would ever need JS. The only valid justification are legacy code-bases, since those are impractical to migrate to no-JS solutions. That is, newer web-sites have no reason to use JS, let alone mandate it.
  • Excessive tracking: JS is much more capable than HTML and CSS combined to track user behavior, because of its first-class access to user-agent (UA) APIs. JS can communicate with almost any server (only limited by CORS) at any time (limited by connection availability), using a plethora of protocols. JS can get hardware information and compute a fingerprint of the device, user, or both.
  • Targeted ads: JS makes it harder for ad-blockers to block ads, since it can be used to make overly-dynamic ads. The data collected by malicious JS makes it trivial to serve personalized ads, even across unrelated sites.
  • Market control: JS (alongside Wasm) are built into almost every web-browser and UA, including "light-weight" ones (such as w3m). Incentivizing companies to use it for everything, since "there's no need to worry about compatibility or portability". Some people say that JS shouldn't even be a Web Standard,[3] implying that it should be an extension or plug-in (such as Java Applets and Adobe Flash) the user willingly installs; this would reduce the incentive to use JS, as there's no guarantee the user has it.

Incidents

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This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents related to this product. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the JavaScript category.

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See also

References

  1. ↑ https://exploringjs.com/es5/ch04.html
  2. ↑ "Usage Statistics of JavaScript as Client-side Programming Language on Websites". W3Techs. Retrieved 2024-02-27.
  3. ↑ https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/06/22/navistone-form-data
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