AngularJS was originally developed in 2009 by Miško Hevery at Brat Tech LLC as the software behind an online JSON storage service, that would have been priced by the megabyte, for easy-to-make applications for the enterprise. This venture was located at the web domain “GetAngular.com”, and had a few subscribers, before the two decided to abandon the business idea and release Angular as an open-source library.
The 1.6 release added many of the concepts of Angular to AngularJS, including the concept of a component-based application architecture. This release among others removed the Sandbox, which many developers believed provided additional security, despite numerous vulnerabilities that had been discovered that bypassed the sandbox. The current (as of February 2018) stable release of AngularJS is 1.6.9.
In January 2018, a schedule was announced for phasing-out AngularJS: after releasing 1.7.0, the active development on AngularJS will continue till June 30, 2018. Afterwards, 1.7 will be supported till June 30, 2021 as long-term support.
Legacy Browser Support
Versions 1.2 and later of AngularJS do not support Internet Explorer versions 6 or 7. Versions 1.3 and later of AngularJS dropped support for Internet Explorer 8.
Angular and AngularDart
Angular 2+ versions are simply called Angular. Angular is an incompatible rewrite of AngularJS. It is a TypeScript-based open-source front-end web application platform. Angular 4 was announced on 13 December 2016, skipping 3 to avoid a confusion due to the misalignment of the router package’s version which was already distributed as v3.3.0.
AngularDart works on Dart, which is an object-oriented, class defined, single inheritance using C# style syntax, that is different from Angular JS (which uses JavaScript) and Angular 2/ Angular 4 (which uses TypeScript). Angular 4 released in March 2017, with the framework’s version aligned with the version number of the router it used. Angular 5 was released on November 1, 2017. Key improvements in Angular 5 include support for progressive Web apps, a build optimizer and improvements related to Material Design. Angular 6 release will be pushed back to March or April 2018, with Angular 7 showing up in September/October 2018. Each version is expected to be backward-compatible with the prior release. Google pledged to do twice-a-year upgrades.