60 free JavaScript trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who created JavaScript in 1995?
Brendan Eich
He went on to co-found the Firefox maker and later the Brave browser company.
Q 02At which company was JavaScript created, for its Navigator browser?
Netscape
Its founders had built Mosaic, the first popular graphical browser, and wanted Navigator to do more than display static pages.
Q 03What was the language called when it first shipped in a Navigator beta in September 1995?
LiveScript
The name switched to JavaScript for the official release that December, riding the hype around Sun's new language.
Q 04JavaScript's creator was originally recruited to embed which existing language in the browser?
Scheme
Management then decided the new language should look like Java instead, which is why the syntax owes so little to Lisp.
Q 05In December 1995, which company jointly announced JavaScript with the browser maker in a press release?
Sun Microsystems
Its creator has called the JavaScript name a marketing ploy to piggyback on a hotter language's popularity.
Q 06Netscape management wanted the syntax of Brendan Eich's new language to resemble which language?
Java
Despite the shared name and syntax, the two languages differ greatly in design.
Q 07Under what name is the language standardised by Ecma International's TC39 committee?
ECMAScript
The first edition was adopted in June 1997, seven months after the language was submitted for standardisation.
Q 08The core language standard is published under which document number?
ECMA-262
ECMA-404 is JSON, ECMA-334 is C#, and ECMA-119 is the ISO 9660 CD-ROM file system.
Q 09Ecma International, the standards body behind the language, is based in which city?
Geneva
The name stopped being an acronym for European Computer Manufacturers Association in 1994.
Q 10What did Internet Explorer 3.0 call its own implementation of the language in 1996?
JScript
The two implementations differed enough to spawn years of 'best viewed in' badges on websites.
Q 11Which term did Jesse James Garrett coin in 2005 for loading data in the background without a full page reload?
Ajax
The XMLHttpRequest idea behind it came from the Outlook Web Access team in 1998.
Q 12Chrome shipped in 2008 with which JavaScript engine, faster than anything else at the time?
V8
It was named after the car engine, and its lead developer was Lars Bak.
Q 13Which engine, the first ever written for the language, has powered Firefox since 2004?
SpiderMonkey
Its JIT compilers have been called TraceMonkey, JägerMonkey, IonMonkey and WarpMonkey.
Apple's WebKit began in 2001 as a fork of KHTML and which KDE JavaScript engine?
Q 21In January 2012, Node's founder handed management of the project to the creator of npm. Who was that?
Isaac Schlueter
Joyent sponsored the project in those years and built the native Windows version with Microsoft in 2011.
Q 22Who created jQuery in January 2006?
John Resig
He wrote it at BarCamp NYC, influenced by Dean Edwards' cssQuery, and it is still the most deployed JavaScript library by a wide margin.
Q 23React was created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer at which company?
It first ran on the News Feed in 2011 and on Instagram in 2012 before being open-sourced.
KJS
Lisa Melton started the WebKit project inside Apple on 25 June 2001, choosing the KDE code because it was small and clean.
Q 15Node.js was created in 2009 by whom?
Ryan Dahl
He was frustrated that Apache could not handle 10,000-plus concurrent connections, and demoed Node at the first European JSConf.
Q 16Node's creator later co-created which runtime, announced in a 2018 talk about his regrets?
Deno
It is written in Rust after an early start in Go, and its name is an anagram of Node.
Q 17The Bun runtime, unlike Node, uses which JavaScript engine?
JavaScriptCore
Jarred Sumner released Bun in September 2021, and Anthropic acquired it in December 2025.
Q 18Which package manager was introduced for Node.js in January 2010?
npm
Officially it is a recursive backronym for 'npm is not an acronym', not 'Node Package Manager'.
Q 19In March 2016, the unpublishing of which tiny package broke Babel, webpack and thousands of builds?
left-pad
It was pulled after a naming dispute between its author Azer Koçulu and the messaging company Kik.
Q 20In December 2014 Fedor Indutny forked Node.js over its governance. What was the fork called?
io.js
The fork tracked the latest V8 releases and was later merged back, with governance passing to what became the OpenJS Foundation.
Q 24React was officially open-sourced at a JavaScript conference in which year?
2013
React Native followed in 2015, announced at React Conf that February.
Q 25React Hooks such as useState and useEffect arrived in which version?
16.8
They let function components hold state and side effects, and cannot be used inside classes.
Q 26Vue.js was created by which developer after he had worked at Google with AngularJS?
Evan You
Vue was publicly announced in February 2014 and is pronounced like 'view'.
Q 27Svelte, the framework that compiles components away at build time, was created by whom?
Rich Harris
Its predecessor was his earlier Ractive.js, and version 1 of Svelte arrived on 29 November 2016.
Q 28Next.js, the React framework with server-side rendering, was created by which company?
Vercel
Guillermo Rauch wrote the original version, released on GitHub on 25 October 2016.
Q 29Which engineer originally developed AngularJS in 2009 for an online JSON storage service?
Miško Hevery
Google eventually stopped updating it on 1 January 2022, having replaced it with the ground-up rewrite Angular.
Q 30Ember.js got its name in December 2011 when which framework's 2.0 version was renamed?
SproutCore
Yehuda Katz, its creator, later sat on TC39, the committee that steers the language.