Node.js is the software that allows you to run Javascript to create powerful server-side applications by using Google's V8 Javascript Engine. As a Node developer myself, I have always felt frustrated by seeing that Joyent, the company behind Node.s, was extremely conservative in terms of upgrading node to use the latest V8 version; the project was also struggling to get developers to actually contribute to code. This is why Fedor Indutny did the unthinkable: forked node and created IO.js. Today, the two projects are uniting possibly offering developers the best of both worlds
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Sunday June 21 2015, @04:19PM
Node is not inside the web browser. You can compile CommonJS (which node uses) into normal ECMAScript that can run in a browser, but the web browser definitely isn't running node. Processing power (and interpreter efficiency) has improved, but there is still a huge gap between ECMAScript in a browser and compiled C. Projects like asm.js and WebAssembly are trying to bridge that gap, but they haven't yet. The fact that they exist shows that there is a need for faster code execution than modern ECMAScript allows. We might as well be honest and up-front about this weakness. There are other reasons to use ECMAScript, and node.