Q:

What purpose does  serves?

During an system update, I saw the following code:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Redirecting...</title>
<script>
    //Redirect Logic....
    location.href = "https://www.example.com";
</script>

</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
    <p>
        Click <a href="https://www.example.com">here</a> to access the service you requested.
    </p>
</body>
</html>

The above page is to redirect user from one page to another, do note that it is a  legacy code.
And the part about < body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" > curious me, the previous developer of this page clearly want to specified that the background should be white. 
Which is strange because from my experience, all browser by default is white, < body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" > doesn't seems to serves any purpose. 
My question is, can anybody be able to guess why this < body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" > code is in there? Maybe some browser used to be black? It would be nice to find out before I inevitably remove this html tag.

A:

all browser by default is white

Indeed. By default. It will override a user CSS, unless the user CSS specifies the background to be !important.
Also, see some historical images - I believe Mosaic used to have grey background by default.

