What happens technically when you type a URL and press Enter?

The browser parses the URL, asks DNS for the server's IP, opens a (possibly encrypted) connection, sends an HTTP request, then fetches and renders the HTML and everything it references.

It feels instant, but a whole chain of steps fires for https://www.hslu.ch/studies:

1. Parse the URL — split out protocol, domain, and path.
2. DNS resolution — look up www.hslu.ch, getting back an IP like 152.96.36.52.
3. TCP connection — open a connection to that IP on the right port (80 for HTTP, 443 for HTTPS).
4. TLS handshake — for HTTPS only, verify the server's certificate and agree on encryption keys.
5. HTTP request — send GET /studies HTTP/1.1.
6. Server processing — the server finds or generates the resource.
7. HTTP response — server returns 200 OK plus the HTML.
8. Parse HTML — the browser reads the HTML and discovers more resources, e.g. <link href="style.css"> and <script src="app.js">.
9. Additional requests — it fetches each of those (CSS, JS, images).
10. Render — once enough has arrived, the page is painted on screen.

Key takeaway: steps 8-9 are why one page is many requests — the first response is just the HTML skeleton, and the browser must chase down every referenced file separately.

Go deeper:

• Client–server model (Wikipedia) — the request/response architecture underpinning every step of this chain.
• Overview of HTTP (MDN) — fills in what the "HTTP request" and "HTTP response" steps actually contain.