In our day to day life we talk to browser to get things exactly what we want, where we just enter the URL in the browser address bar. Browser actually makes request to the server on behalf of us, when server gives the response, browser renders the webpage the way it’s coded. In between browser request and final rendering of application/website we doesn’t know anything that browser take care for us. It will be very interesting if we know what is really happening in between browser request and final rendering of application/website.
In the below video Ryan Seddon explaining how browser actually understands the given HTML page from the server, and also explaining how browser converts into designed/painted version of the application/website. Please spend some time to go through the video to know inner workings about How Does Browser Works.
High level work flow of Browser
This is the high level step by step work flow of how browser actually renders website.
Browser actually creates the rendered tree for both HTML and CSS from given HTML page, then from the rendered tree it creates layout of coded HTML and finally does painting from the CSS style we coded.
Read more.
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/