Have you ever wondered what happens behind the screen when you enter a URL into your browser? Well, I was just as curious a few days ago and decided to look it up. Here’s a quick summary of what I found.

Step 1 — When a URL is typed into a browser, the browser searches locally for the domain name IP address in the Domain Name System (DNS). The search is done as follows:

• First, the browser cache is searched.
• Then the Operating System (OS) cache is checked.
• Then the router cache is checked.
• Lastly, the Internet Service Provider(ISP) cache is searched.

Step 2 — After the browser has received the domain name IP address, it connects to the server using TCP protocol.

Step 3 — Then, the browser sends an HTTP request to the server.

Step 4 — The server sends an HTTP response back to the browser.

Step 5 — The browser renders the response eg HTML.

Step 6 — The browser then sends subsequent requests as needed to the server to get the embedded links, javascript, images in the HTML and then repeats steps 3 to 5.

This is all there is to it.

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