January 4, 2026
From pizza to protocol pandemonium
Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
HN clicks, nitpicks, bookmarks—and someone starts a brand-new browser
TLDR: A playful, open-source guide shows how your browser turns words into web pages, with clickable demos. Comments cheer, nitpick a layout bug, ask for resource-loading basics, drop learning links, and spark drama as one user vows to build a non-Chrome browser—proof the web is both curious and wildly opinionated.
A playful, clicky guide launches on Hacker News, with tiny demos that turn “pizza” into a search URL and show the raw request a browser sends. It explains HTTP (the rules websites use to talk), DNS (the internet’s address book), and SSL/TLS (the security locks), while keeping it short by skipping deep protocol rabbit holes. It’s open source and invites fixes and features, so of course the comments light up.
Fans cheer—utopiah says it feels like browser.engineering but easier—and immediately ask for cute laptop/server visuals. The pixel police arrive: philk10 complains that on narrow screens the contents menu floats over the page, sparking UI drama. Link-slingers drop hpbn.co and every-layout.dev, claiming “the paid stuff is worth it.” Meanwhile, arendtio wants the missing chapter: how pages load images, styles, and scripts, aka why sites sometimes look broken.
Then the twist: logicallee says they’re building a brand-new browser not based on Chrome or Firefox, and wonders how much AI can do. The crowd splits between “ambitious!” and “please, not another browser.” Memes appear—HN bingo: bookmark, bug report, link dump, start your own browser. Verdict? The guide makes tricky stuff feel simple; the comments make it spicy. And everyone wants more visuals.
Key Points
- •The guide is open-source and invites contributions via issues or pull requests.
- •It uses interactive examples to build intuition about how browsers work.
- •Text typed in the address bar is converted into a search URL (e.g., Google or DuckDuckGo).
- •Domain inputs are normalized into full URLs (e.g., https://example.com).
- •The guide demonstrates translating URLs into HTTP requests and explains basic headers like Host and Accept.