web client

A web client is a program capable of communicating with Web servers, requesting and receiving information from them, and processing it for display or other uses.

Your web browser is an example of a web client. The remote machine containing the document you requested is called a web server. The client and server communicate using a special language (a «protocol») called using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The web server listens on a port on the network, and waits for client requests using the HTTP protocol. After the server responds to the request (using HTTP), the network connection is dropped and the browser processes the relevant data that it received, then displays it on your screen. With every web transaction, HTTP is invoked.

In practice, many clients can be using the same server at the same time, and one client can also use many servers at the same time.