fun fact. in the browser wars of 1993(?) i looked at the specs from netscape (mozilla dady for the young folks) and microsoft (what w3c? ha!) and netscape release a browser spec that said "X must support up to Y", as in "url must be up to 1024 chars", "cookies must be up to 1mb", etc...

then microsoft release IE4 (or 6?) web spec. It was literally a copy of netscape's but with "up to" replaced with "at least".

and from this day on, nobody knows about limits on the standard and everything was up in the air, just so sites could work on IE4 and be broken on netscape. Thanks microsoft!

I did some experiments to test the actual URL limit of IE. at the time it was around 4MB, but IE would still go over if you got creative with hostnames levels and odd schemas.

-- quick edit:

keep in mind, in 1993, the money from giving out free browsers where on the servers: netscape server vs microsoft IIS (just like today giving free browsers the money is on makig it easier to access YOUR content --e.g. default search, etc).

Making your browser crash the competitor server mean that server was seen as lower quality. (Same thing with google deliberately crashing performance of firefox on their services today[0])

The point of microsoft making this change was to force netscape to update their server as they increase the URL limit arbitrarily to all IE users.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...