[JdeBP]

There was a time when gopher: scheme URLs would just work, because GOPHER support was built in to popular WWW browsers. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer both had it, for example.

It's not that gopher: is some novelty that no-one has ever adopted. It's that a WWW browser nowadays lacks quite a lot of things that used to be commonly built-in to WWW browsers. gopher: scheme support has gone completely, as has news: support. ftp: support has been reimplemented several times, and is significantly poorer now than it used to be.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/web-browser-ftp-hall-of-shame.html