JavaScript Trivia
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98 free JavaScript trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
59 free JavaScript trivia questions with answers. JavaScript trivia for developers who want something better than 'what does typeof null return'. The quiz covers the language's history (Netscape, LiveScript, the Java marketing tie-in, the Sun and Oracle trademark), its standardisation by Ecma's TC39, the engines and runtimes that run it (SpiderMonkey, V8, JavaScriptCore, Node, Deno, Bun), the tooling and library ecosystem (npm, jQuery, React, Vue, Svelte, Next.js, Electron), and the language itself: hoisting, strict mode, NaN, template literals, BigInt, and the event loop. Fifty-nine questions run from easy (who created JavaScript?) to hard (which KDE engine did WebKit fork? which package broke the internet in March 2016?). It works as a warm-up for a dev team meeting, a round in a tech-themed pub quiz, or a way to find out how much of the ecosystem's history you actually know. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the language, its standard, its engines, and the people and projects around it, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who created JavaScript in 1995?
Brendan Eich
Brendan Eich wrote the first version in ten days in May 1995; he went on to co-found the Firefox maker and, in 2015, the Brave browser company.
Q 02At which company was JavaScript created in 1995?
Netscape
Netscape, founded in 1994 by Jim Clark and Mosaic co-author Marc Andreessen, wanted its browser to do more than display static pages and hired a language designer in April 1995 to build a scripting language.
Q 03What was JavaScript called when it first shipped in a browser beta in September 1995?
LiveScript
LiveScript was the name in the September 1995 beta of the 2.0 browser; the switch to JavaScript came that December, borrowing the glow of a hotter language.
Q 04JavaScript's creator was originally recruited to embed which existing language in the browser?
Scheme
Scheme, the minimalist Lisp dialect, was what the new hire had been promised he could put in the browser; management then demanded a more conventional syntax, and first-class functions were the main thing to survive from the plan.
Q 05In December 1995, which company jointly announced JavaScript with the browser maker in a press release?
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems and the browser maker issued the joint press release on 4 December 1995; the new name was a co-branding move, meant to ride the fame of Sun's own hot new language.
Q 06Management wanted the syntax of the new browser scripting language to resemble which language?
Java
Java was the model: a management diktat said the new language must 'look like Java', so it took Java's braces and keywords even though it works very differently underneath.
Q 07The core language standard is published under which document number?
ECMA-262
ECMA-262 is the standard for the language itself, first published in June 1997; ECMA-404 is JSON, ECMA-334 is C#, and ECMA-119 is the ISO 9660 CD-ROM file system.
Q 08Ecma International, the standards body behind JavaScript, has been based since 1961 in which Swiss city?
Geneva
Geneva has housed Ecma since it was founded in 1961 as the European Computer Manufacturers Association; when it went global in 1994 it dropped the acronym and kept Ecma as a plain name.
Q 09What did Microsoft call its own version of JavaScript when it shipped in Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996?
JScript
JScript shipped in Internet Explorer 3.0 in August 1996; Microsoft gave its version a different name to get around the trademark on 'JavaScript', though it was the same language.
Q 10Which term did Jesse James Garrett coin in 2005 for loading data in the background without a full page reload?
Ajax
Ajax, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, was the label in Garrett's February 2005 essay; the XMLHttpRequest object behind it came from Microsoft's Outlook Web Access team and first shipped in Internet Explorer 5.
Q 11Which JavaScript engine did Google build for the 2008 launch of its Chrome browser?
V8
V8, named after the car engine, was built not at Google's California base but in Denmark, by a small team under Lars Bak, and launched with Chrome on 2 September 2008.
Q 12Which engine, descended from the very first one written for JavaScript, powers the Firefox browser?
SpiderMonkey
SpiderMonkey began when the language's creator stayed home for two weeks in 1996 to rewrite his rushed original engine; opened to outside developers along with the browser's code, it ended up inside Firefox.
Q 13Apple's WebKit and its JavaScript engine began in 2001 as forks of the engines inside which browser?
Konqueror
Q 21Who created jQuery in January 2006?
John Resig
John Resig unveiled jQuery at BarCamp NYC in January 2006, influenced by Dean Edwards' cssQuery; its chainable methods and CSS-style selectors made cross-browser DOM scripting bearable.
Q 22React was created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer at which company?
Facebook engineer Jordan Walke built the early prototype, FaxJS, and brought it into the company's code; in 2012 Instagram's web team chose to build its whole site with it.
Q 23Which syntax, unveiled with React in 2013, lets developers write HTML-like markup inside JavaScript?
JSX
JSX grew out of XHP, a PHP extension its makers already used to build pages; browsers cannot read it, so a compiler turns every tag into a plain function call.
Konqueror's KHTML and KJS engines were picked because they were small, under 140,000 lines, and cleanly designed, as Apple's Safari team told the KDE developers in 2003.
Q 14Node.js was created in 2009 by whom?
Ryan Dahl
Ryan Dahl built Node because servers that give every connection its own thread cope badly with thousands at once; his design keeps a single thread and never blocks while waiting on input or output.
Q 15Node's creator later co-created which runtime, announced in a 2018 talk about his regrets?
Deno
Deno, an anagram of Node, was unveiled in his talk '10 Things I Regret About Node.js'; it answers one regret by refusing scripts any file or network access until they are given permission.
Q 16The Bun runtime, unlike Node, is built on which engine?
JavaScriptCore
JavaScriptCore, the engine Apple builds for Safari, powers Bun; its makers say the choice cuts startup time and memory use, the runtime's main selling points.
Q 17Which package manager was introduced for Node.js in January 2010?
npm
npm was first published in January 2010 and bundled with Node from late 2011; its documentation insists the name is a recursive backronym for 'npm is not an acronym', not 'Node Package Manager'.
Q 18In March 2016, the unpublishing of which tiny package broke Babel and thousands of other builds?
left-pad
left-pad, an 11-line function, vanished when Azer Koçulu unpublished all his modules after the registry sided with the messaging company Kik in a dispute over the name 'kik'; thousands of builds broke until it was restored.
Q 19Which fork of Node.js did Fedor Indutny start in December 2014 amid a dispute over the project's governance?
io.js
io.js was run by an open technical committee instead of a single company; nine months on, the two projects reunited as Node.js 4.0 under a new neutral foundation.
Q 20Which web framework for Node.js did TJ Holowaychuk release in 2010?
Express
Express outlasted its author's interest in Node: in 2014 Holowaychuk handed the project to the company StrongLoop and announced he was leaving Node for the Go language.
Q 24Which React feature, released in version 16.8, lets function components keep state without writing a class?
Hooks
Hooks such as useState arrived in February 2019 and took over so fully that React's own documentation later moved class components to a section called legacy APIs.
Q 25Vue.js was created by which developer after he had worked at Google with AngularJS?
Evan You
Evan You, then at Google Creative Lab, began Vue to keep the parts of AngularJS he liked without the weight; it was publicly announced in February 2014 and is pronounced like 'view'.
Q 26Svelte, the framework that compiles components away at build time, was created by whom?
Rich Harris
Rich Harris built Svelte's forerunner, Ractive, at The Guardian for interactive news apps; Svelte followed in 2016 because, he wrote, 'we're shipping too much code to our users'.
Q 27Next.js, the React framework with server-side rendering, was created by which company?
Vercel
Vercel was still called ZEIT when Guillermo Rauch's team put Next.js on GitHub in October 2016; the company took its present name only in April 2020.
Q 28Which engineer created AngularJS, the framework Google later rewrote from scratch as Angular?
Miško Hevery
Miško Hevery's original lost out to its own successor: once the rewrite had taken over, Google ended all support for AngularJS at the close of 2021.
Q 29Ember.js got its name in December 2011 when which framework's 2.0 version was renamed?
SproutCore
SproutCore 2.0, the rewrite Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale led, was renamed Ember.js in December 2011 because it had diverged so far from the original framework; Katz later sat on TC39, the committee that steers the language.
Q 30CoffeeScript, Backbone.js and Underscore.js were all created by which developer?
Jeremy Ashkenas
Jeremy Ashkenas made his first CoffeeScript commit on 13 December 2009, labelled 'initial commit of the mystery language', having released Underscore.js earlier that year; Backbone.js followed in October 2010.