What Happens Between Your Browser and the Internet?
Most people click a link and expect magic. The page loads (or doesn't), and that's about as far as the thinking goes. Fair enough. But there's actually a pretty interesting chain of events happening in that half-second before anything shows up on screen.
Worth understanding, honestly. Especially when things break and you're stuck wondering why.
DNS Lookups: Finding the Address
Your browser doesn't know where websites live. Type in "reddit.com" and it has to go ask someone for directions first.
That someone is a DNS server. It translates the domain name into an IP address, basically a string of numbers like 151.101.1.140. Takes about 20 to 50 milliseconds on most connections. Your ISP runs the default DNS server, though plenty of people switch to Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8) for speed. The proxy search guide at MarsProxies.com walks through how DNS and other network configurations affect where your traffic actually goes.
The Handshake Nobody Sees
Got the IP address. Now what?
Your computer breaks the request into packets and fires them off. These packets take different routes to the destination, which seems chaotic but works surprisingly well. Before any real data moves though, there's a quick handshake. Your machine sends a SYN packet, the server responds SYN-ACK, you confirm with ACK. Networking people call it the "three-way handshake" and yes, it happens every single time.
All this adds latency. Maybe 10 milliseconds if the server's nearby, up to 100ms if it's across an ocean. Businesses testing international connections often use services like IPRoyal's reliable static residential proxies to simulate users from specific locations. The IPs come from real ISP networks, so they look identical to normal household connections.
Proxies in the Middle
Sometimes your traffic doesn't go direct. It routes through a proxy server first, which grabs your request, forwards it along, and passes the response back. The destination only sees the proxy's IP.
Why bother? Lots of reasons. Companies check how their websites render in different countries. Researchers scrape pricing data. Schools block distracting sites (or try to). Wikipedia has a solid overview of how proxy servers evolved alongside the early internet. They've been around since the 90s, doing roughly the same job.
Corporate networks route everything through proxies for security monitoring. VPNs work on similar principles, just with encryption wrapped around the whole thing.
CDNs and Why Location Matters
Netflix doesn't beam videos from one server farm in Los Gatos. They'd melt. Instead, copies of popular content sit on edge servers scattered worldwide through Content Delivery Networks.
Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront. These companies operate thousands of servers across dozens of countries. When you stream something, you're probably hitting a server less than 50 miles away.
Numbers make it concrete. User in Singapore accessing a US-only server: 180 to 220ms latency per request. Same user hitting a Singapore edge server: maybe 15ms. The Internet Engineering Task Force has published extensively on how CDN architecture became essential infrastructure over the past decade.
Encryption (That Padlock Icon)
HTTPS means your connection is encrypted with TLS. Eavesdroppers between you and the server see scrambled nonsense instead of your passwords and credit cards.
Your browser checks the server's certificate before proceeding. Wrong domain, expired cert, shady issuer? You get a warning page. Most people click through anyway, defeating the entire purpose. TLS 1.3 shipped in 2018 with fewer vulnerabilities and about 33% faster handshakes than previous versions. Researchers at Stanford's cryptography group continue publishing work that shapes how these protocols develop.
What Your ISP Knows
Even with HTTPS everywhere, your ISP sees which IP addresses you connect to. They can't read encrypted content, but they know you visited certain domains.
DNS queries leak more than people realize. By default, they're unencrypted. Every domain you look up, visible to your ISP. DNS-over-HTTPS fixes this, though it adds maybe 15 to 30 milliseconds of overhead. Some privacy-focused users stack encrypted DNS with a VPN. Belt and suspenders approach.
Where This Goes Next
HTTP/3 is gaining adoption fast. Better packet handling, roughly 10 to 15% faster page loads in real-world tests. Edge computing keeps pushing servers closer to users.
None of it matters much until something breaks. Then knowing how the pieces connect helps you figure out where things went wrong.
