The Winds of Change

Everything changed in the years following the end of the Browser Wars I. A number of processes reshaped the web development landscape in a very positive way.

In this healthier environment, developers started finding out new and better ways to use the instruments that were already available. After the public release of applications such as Gmail and Google Maps, which were rich on client-side programming, it became clear that JavaScript is a mature, unique in certain ways, and powerful prototypal object-oriented language. The best example of it's rediscovery is the wide adoption of the functionality provided by the XMLHttpRequest object, which was once an IE-only innovation, but was then implemented by most other browsers. XMLHttpRequest allows JavaScript to make HTTP requests and get fresh content from the server in order to update some parts of a page, without a full page reload. Due to the wide use of XMLHttpRequest, a new breed of desktop-like web applications, dubbed AJAX applications, was born.