[russellbeattie]

I think that for consumer applications, JavaScript took a while to be really useful - like someone else noted Gmail was the first serious JS app I can think of. But for Intranets, it was pretty essential pretty quickly as web apps took over from Lotus Notes, Access databases, a million dBase applications and other proprietary front ends. And Microsoft was pushing it (and VBScript) hard in Internet Explorer under the DHTML moniker.

In 1999 I worked on a contract for Levi's in SF and clearly remember using JavaScript to pull data from a huge hierarchy of product styles and presenting it to the end user as a widget where they could add/remove/move entries around. I remember abusing the cookies API to save the latest client state between page refreshes as it was the only real way to do that at the time. Something like this would have been a total pain in the ass without logic in the browser. In fact, I may have been replacing some sort of Java Applet or ActiveX widget which did something similar in a slower, less flexible way.

So whether it was a huge success outside of corporations or not, I was using it to make a living pretty much from day one.

[johannes1234321]

First proper JavaScript apps were Firefox/Netscape 9/Thunderbird where the user interface was done in JavaScript+XUL, while not being loaded from a server and most logic was done in C++.