* Patrick W. Gilmore:
I'm not so sure. Name-based virtual hosting for plain HTTP was introduced when Windows NT 4.0 was still in wide use. It originally came with Internet Explorer 2.0, which did not send the Host: header in HTTP requests.
NT4 was never heavily adopted by users.
It was fairly popular on corporate desktops, until 2005 or so. You really don't want to know details.
Also, not nearly as many billions were being sold on e-commerce sites.
We're talking pretty much recent history here, closer to 2005 than to 2000. Here are some statistics from a popular IT web site in Germany, from mid-2006: <http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Mozilla-Firefox-gewinnt-wieder-Marktanteile-140479.html> They report a 2.5% market share. Of course, these clients weren't running Internet Explorer 2.0 anymore, and this offers a clue what will happen if SNI is a desirable feature in browsers. 8-)