Originally named Ethereal, the project was renamed Wireshark in May 2006 due to trademark issues.

[5] Wireshark is cross-platform, using the Qt widget toolkit in current releases to implement its user interface, and using pcap to capture packets; it runs on Linux, macOS, BSD, Solaris, some other Unix-like operating systems, and Microsoft Windows.

Wireshark is very similar to tcpdump, but has a graphical front-end and integrated sorting and filtering options.

On Linux, BSD, and macOS, with libpcap 1.0.0 or later, Wireshark 1.4 and later can also put wireless network interface controllers into monitor mode.

The commercial protocol analysis products at the time were priced around $1500[6] and did not run on the company's primary platforms (Solaris and Linux), so Gerald began writing Ethereal and released the first version around 1998.

[11] Wireshark has won several industry awards over the years,[12] including eWeek,[13] InfoWorld,[14][15][16][17][18] and PC Magazine.

[19] It is also the top-rated packet sniffer in the Insecure.Org network security tools survey[20] and was the SourceForge Project of the Month in August 2010.

[21] Combs continues to maintain the overall code of Wireshark and issue releases of new versions of the software.

[29] Wireshark can also be used to capture packets from most network simulation tools such as ns and OPNET Modeler.