Temporal — the end of new Date() (and the date bugs we put up with for 30 years)
· 13 min read
Every JavaScript developer has a story with Date. The report that showed the previous day. The due date that jumped from January 31 to March 3. The birth date that changed when the user was in another time zone. The 300KB moment installed just to add a month.
Date was created in 1995, in a few days, copied from java.util.Date. Java itself deprecated most of that API shortly afterwards. JavaScript kept it for 30 years.
That's over. In March 2026 Temporal reached Stage 4 at TC39 and became part of ECMAScript 2026. It already runs without flags in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Node 26.
This article is about what actually got better. With real, running examples, side by side with new Date().