What actually happens when a browser loads a page?
I thought typing a URL just “opened a website”. It turns out a lot happens before a single pixel appears.
What I thought
You type an address, the page appears. I assumed the browser simply “fetched the website” in one step, like opening a file on my computer.
What actually happens
The name has to become a number first. The browser asks DNS to translate the domain into an IP address, opens a connection, and only then asks the server for the page.
The server sends back HTML — mostly text. The browser reads it top to bottom, discovers it needs more things (styles, scripts, images), and goes to fetch those too.
kamana.example → DNS → 93.184.216.34 → request → HTMLWhat confused me
Why the page can appear before everything has downloaded. It felt like it should wait for all of it. Learning that the browser builds the page progressively made that click.
What finally made sense
A page isn’t a single object that arrives. It’s a set of instructions the browser assembles into a document, then paints. “Loading” is really a lot of small, ordered steps.
What I’m looking at next
How caching changes all of this the second time you visit — and why some things load instantly while others don’t.
Written while figuring it out. Possibly wrong in places — that’s part of learning.
Why arrays aren’t “just lists.”