The browser’s rendering process is a complex orchestration of multiple threads, processes, and stages that transform raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript i

Exploring the browser rendering process

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2024-11-17 20:30:17

The browser’s rendering process is a complex orchestration of multiple threads, processes, and stages that transform raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into interactive pixels on our screen. While the rendering processes of the browser are nothing new and there is an abundance of information available on this topic, I thought it is interesting enough to write an interactive post on this. So essentially, our goal here is to understand what all happens in between these two points below:

I will be using the term client, browser and server throughout this post. Here, browser is a client. In this post’s context, they are the same thing. And the server refers to the web server hosting the website.

The process starts when you type a URL in the browser’s address bar and hit enter. Let us assume we are trying to load https://example.com. The browser has no idea where to get the content of this website. It’s just a name that we humans can understand. The browser needs to convert this name into an IP address. This is where the DNS lookup comes into play.

DNS stands for Domain Name System. This system uses designated authoritative nameservers to map domain names to numerical IP addresses.

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