What is a browser?
In one sentence: The app you use to visit websites. It fetches pages and draws them.
A little more
When you type an address or tap a link, the browser does a surprising amount of work: it looks up the server's number with DNS, sets up a secure connection, asks for the page, then reads the HTML, fetches the pictures, styles and scripts it mentions, and paints the result on your screen. All of that usually takes well under a second.
Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge are all browsers. They follow the same shared rules (web standards), which is why one web page can work on all of them.
It's a bit like… A browser is like a very fast librarian: you name a book, it fetches every page from the right shelf and lays them out for you to read.
See it in action
- 1What happens when you open a web page?Follow one click from your keyboard to a server and back: DNS, the padlock handshake, HTTP, tunnels and painting the page.6 min · interactive
- 2Anatomy of a web addressPaste any web address and see it taken apart, colour by colour: scheme, host, port, path, query and the fragment that never reaches the server.5 min · interactive