The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user. This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), for example "<nowiki>http://en.wikipedia.org/</nowiki>", into the browser. The prefix of the URI determines how the URI will be interpreted. The most commonly used kind of URI starts with "http:" and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as "https:" for HTTPS, "ftp:" for the File Transfer Protocol, and "file:" for local files. Prefixes that the web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For example, "mailto:" URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application, and "news:" URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader.

In the case of "http", "https", "file", and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it. HTML is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document. Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets. Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.

Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains the URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again.

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