Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?


I never said the browser does it. I just said it was assumed and not necessary to be typed into the browser.
If you didn’t mean the browser, then I don’t see how this makes any sense:
What’s “it” here which is attempting something? It’s not the website since the address was not valid, and a website wouldn’t redirect you to a “www” if it wasn’t valid either and was going to result in a 404. So who’s “attempting” to unsuccessfully use the “www” subdomain?