Development history[edit]

AngularJS was originally developed in 2009 by Miko Hevery[14] at Brat Tech LLC[15] 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",[15] and had a few subscribers, before the two
decided to abandon the business idea and release Angular as an open-source library.

Releases[edit]
Angular 1[edit]
The current stable release of AngularJS is 1.5.8.[16]
Angular 2[edit]
AngularJS 2.0 was announced at the ng-Europe conference 22-23. September 2014.[17] The drastic changes in the 2.0
version created considerable controversy among developers.[18] On April 30, 2015, the AngularJS developers
announced that Angular 2 moved from Alpha to Developer Preview.[19] AngularJS 2 can be downloaded from the official
website. Angular 2 moved to Beta in December 2015,[20] and the first release candidate was published in May
2016.[21] The final version was released on September 14, 2016.
Angular 2 is not a version upgrade, but a complete rewrite. The primary differences in Angular 2 over Angular 1 are:[22]

Mobile development desktop development is much easier when mobile performance issues are handled first
Modularity much core functionality has moved to modules, producing a lighter, faster core
Modern browsers only reducing the need for browser compatibility workarounds
Angular 2 recommends the use of Microsoft's TypeScript language, which introduces the following improvements:

Static Typing
Generics
Lambdas

TypeScript is a superset of ECMAScript 6, and is backwards compatible with ECMAScript 5 (i.e.: JavaScript).
Angular 2 also includes the benefits of ES6:

Class-based Object Oriented Programming

Iterators
For/Of loops
Python-style generators
Reflection

Improved dependency injection bindings make it possible for dependencies to be named

Dynamic loading
Asynchronous template compilation
Simpler Routing
Diary.js logging measures where time is spent, to identify bottlenecks[23]
Replacing controllers and $scope with components and directives a component is a directive with a template
Reactive programming support using RxJS

Legacy browser support[edit]

Versions 1.2 and later of AngularJS do not support Internet Explorer versions 6 or 7.[24] Versions 1.3 and later of
AngularJS dropped support for Internet Explorer 8.[25]

Chrome extension[edit]
In July 2012, the Angular team built an extension for the Google Chrome browser called Batarang,[26] that improves the
debugging experience for web applications built with Angular. The extension aims to allow for easy detection of
performance bottlenecks and offers a GUI for debugging applications.[27] For a time during late 2014 and early 2015, the
extension was not compatible with recent releases (after v1.2.x) of Angular.[28] It currently, as of late 2016, still works
with all versions of Angular (although there have been no updates to the source code since March 2016[29]).