What happend to WWW.?

I remember in the early days, you HAD to put the WWW. in the address.

Now a days, you don't. What happened, or changed?

A few years a go at school, I over herd someone talking as I walked by. Not sure what exactly he said, but I think it was something like, "3rd tear internet we don't have to put the WWW. in." (What ever 3rd tear internet is)
Like I said, I was just walking by and may of not heard him right, or even about what he was talking about.

So, what happened to having to put WWW.?

Thank you for the reply's,
Chris.

Browsers have gotten smarter. The browsers will assume the www. If you just type google in the address bar, it will assume .com

When a website is registered, it can be registered as whatever.com *and* www.whatever.com. Some websites do no work without the www.

Also, Midknyte is right on. Browsers and DNS servers pretty much take over the process these days and assume (sometimes incorrectly) what you want.

Any idea the ratio of websites work with out putting www. and ones you have to?

Chris.

You didn't say which browser you use. I doubt you need to put the www. in front of ANY URLs. The browser would be smart enough to prefix them with www. if necessary.

Not IE8 though. :( It's stupid and breaks the Google browse-by-name feature.

When the World Wide Web first appeared, the prefix was thought necessary to distinguish these requests from existing service prefixes like FTP and NNTP (newsgroups) because at the time, web traffic played a small part, but today it constitutes virtually all of the traffic, so the prefix is just generally considered unnecessary. These prefixes are simply sub-domains that never were required by any technical or policy standard. I would think that most websites today are set up to accept requests with or without that prefix, no matter which browser you are using. I know all of mine are.
Firefox was the first client to treat this server side annoyance in an intelligent way, as has been explained above. Others have followed with varying degrees of success.
I would expect that the www convention will eventually disappear altogether.

Also depending on how IIS is configured on the web server can affect if it’ll work with or without the “WWW”.