Understanding Your Web Browser Part I

Understanding Your Web Browser Part I

This is a two-part article, Understanding Your Web Browser. Part two will appear in my next post.

Zoom, zoom
When we want to go somewhere in our car, we open the door, climb in, sit down, strap in, then turn on the engine. Next, we take off the brake, put the car in gear, then push the pedal and off we go. We're mobile - and our windshield is our portal to the world.

Hitting the open road of the web
When it comes to our computer we go through a not dissimilar sequence of sitting, powering on, and engaging (the CPU's power) to get someplace. Usually this entails opening a web browser and hitting the open road of the Internet. The browser is our windshield as we cruise the wild wild web, a.k.a. the world wide web.

Because the browser is our virtual portal it's important to know some essentials about it. This is especially relevant because the web is an increasingly hazardous place to journey. So here are some key points:

Browsers a plenty 
Common browsers include Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari (mainly for Mac), Brave, Vivaldi, etc. No, dear readers, Facebook is not a browser, nor is Google. Google is a company (or an internet empire) that developed the Chrome browser. Microsoft built Internet Explorer and Edge, Mozilla created Firefox, etc. If you want to experiment with a different browser than you're used to I suggest you check out Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com. I like their philosophy, explained here: https://vivaldi.com/company

Constant translation
A browser's main job is to render computer code, primarily html (hypertext markup language), into a human-intelligible format. If you ever want to view the true code your browser is interpreting, you can view the source of any page. It's all listed in English words but contains lots of characters that direct the browser how to "build the page" layout. That's oversimplifying, but it's the gist. To view the page source code in Firefox click the three horizontal bars at upper right, then Web Developer, then Page Source.

Destination IP address
When you type in a website address into your browser's address bar at top (not the search field if you’re on search site like www.google.com) it immediately gets sent to a name server (a DNS server). This name server translates the typed address into a numeric address which all webservers use to uniquely identify themselves. For example Google's IP is 172.217.15.78. You can type either that IP or www.google.com into your browser to access that site. You can explore more about IP addressees here: https://www.whatismyip.com/

The browser does it all
So, in your browser you access websites and all the resources on the sites such as static text and pictures, video, music, animation, fillable forms, games, etc. If you have a stable internet connection and your computer's hardware and operating system are running properly, the browser is the translator of all experiences you have on the web. This goes for any site you access, from the ultra-common like Facebook.com to obscure sites providing scientific articles.

Hats off to web browsers!

Thanks for reading!
-Sam