What does the acronym QUIC stand for, and what is its timeline of development and standardization?

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Accepted Answer

QUIC = "Quick UDP Internet Connections." Google introduced it in 2012; the IETF standardized it in May 2021.
QUIC is a transport protocol designed to make web traffic faster than the classic TCP+TLS stack. Its history matters for understanding why firewalls struggle with it:

2012: Google presents QUIC as an experimental protocol.
2015: Google publishes performance comparisons showing far fewer round-trips for connection setup than TCP.
May 2021: The IETF standardizes QUIC, and HTTP/3 (HTTP over QUIC) follows.

Because QUIC was driven by browser/server vendors to optimize performance, middlebox (firewall/proxy) vendors were effectively playing catch-up — the protocol shipped widely in browsers before security appliances could inspect it.
Where it runs: QUIC reuses the familiar ports UDP/80 and UDP/443, but everything else differs from TCP — which is exactly why a firewall that recognizes "port 443" still can't treat it like HTTPS.
Tip: Same port numbers as HTTP/HTTPS, but UDP instead of TCP — the port alone tells you nothing.
Go deeper:

QUIC (Wikipedia) — the naming history and the 2012→RFC-9000 (May 2021) timeline, and why middleboxes lagged.
 RFC 9000 — QUIC — the authoritative standardization milestone.