Understanding the Important Role of Web Browsers

A Basic Introduction to Browsers

The internet is a vast, boundless, and unregulated digital space that houses an infinite amount of content. As one can imagine, if content exists in the digital realm of the internet, surely there is a way to access it. Content on the internet — whether it be web pages, images, videos, or other multimedia content — all have a unique web address. Formally, this is called a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. This is essentially where the content lives.

The web content’s relationship with web addresses is analogous to humans’ relationship with home addresses. The obvious difference is the fact home addresses exist in the physical world, whereas web addresses exists in an intangible, digital world.

It begs the question: How can we access the internet?

How can we interact with something that does not exist in the physical world?

The answer is Web Browsers.

What Is A Web Browser?

A web browser is a piece of software that allows us to access and navigate through the internet. The web browser performs a series of background operations to display to the users the web content they request to see. That means displaying web pages, images, videos, and other multi-media web content.

Popular web browsers include Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Apple’s Safari.

All these web browsers implement a very crucial feature: the search bar. The search bar allows us to enter a web address — as discussed earlier — to visit websites across the internet. After the user enters the web address and hits enter, the browser will display the appropriate website. You know how that process goes.

What you might not know are the behind-the-scenes operations. What exactly happens from the browser’s perspective?

The Process

The user enters the web address — which we assume is correct — and hits enter. At this point in time, the browser needs to figure out what it needs to display. There are an infinite amount of web addresses on the internet, and it is impossible for your browser to memorize how to display every single one of those addresses.

To load the requested web page, the browser needs to communicate with the web server. The browser works in tandem with the web server to find where the assets and instructions for that web page are located. (These assets and instructions are located on a remote server.)

The web server is searching for these assets and instructions — which are written in Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. Eventually, the web server finds what it’s looking for; it finds an IP Address that is associated with the server that holds the assets and instructions. Now, the web server is ready to do its part and send data back to the browser.

Before that transmission of data can happen, however, the browser and the web server must form a connection. This connection involves the TPC Handshake and possibly the TLS Negotiation Handshake. To put it simply, TPC Handshake is all about forming an appropriate connection, as it relates to the data, between computer and web server. In contrast, TLS Negotiation is more about establishing a secure, encrypted connection between computer and web server.

After this connection is successfully established, the data can be transmitted from the web server to the browser. This transmission of data uses Hypertext Transform Protocol, or HTP. This protocol is essentially a guideline or web standard that defines how data is transmitted and displayed. This protocol is important because, fortunately, people who access the internet have options; they can use a handful of different web browsers. HTP standards exist to ensure the website experience is mostly the same across web browsers.

As the data is being transmitted and the instructions are being fulfilled, the web browser is displaying the web page we requested.

And the magic of it all is that this entire lengthy process occurs in a matter of seconds.