You can find the answer in a Github repository


We are not at the levels of the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”, but we’re close.

In this github repository i’ve found a really accurate (collaborative) technical explanation of what happens once you start writing an url in your browser’s address bar:

Except instead of the usual story, we’re going to try to answer this question in as much detail as possible. No skipping out on anything.

This is a collaborative process, so dig in and try to help out! There’s tons of details missing, just waiting for you to add them! So send us a pull request, please!

Make yourself comfortable, it is a long journey!

[embed][/embed]

Table of Contents

  • The “g” key is pressed
  • The “enter” key bottoms out
  • Interrupt fires [NOT for USB keyboards]
  • (On Windows) A WM_KEYDOWN message is sent to the app
  • (On OS X) A KeyDown NSEvent is sent to the app
  • (On GNU/Linux) the Xorg server listens for keycodes
  • Parse URL
  • Is it a URL or a search term?
  • Check HSTS list
  • Convert non-ASCII Unicode characters in hostname
  • DNS lookup
  • ARP process
  • Opening of a socket
  • TLS handshake
  • HTTP protocol
  • HTTP Server Request Handle
  • Behind the scenes of the Browser
  • Browser
  • HTML parsing
  • CSS interpretation
  • Page Rendering
  • GPU Rendering
  • Window Server
  • Post-rendering and user-induced execution