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If you have two browser windows open and you use each to navigate to a different website, then how does the software know which HTTP response belongs to which browser instance?
It seems that the distinction is made by the inbound TCP port numbers. But what about network messages that don’t involve TCP/UDP? For example, if you open two terminal applications and use both send a ping message to the same remote server, how does the reply find its way to its terminal instance?
Typically, each browser instance creates its own socket to communicate with the server. Though the outbound port of all the sockets is the same (usually TCP 80 or 443), their inbound ports are different. Thus, there are no conflicts when the server responds to the requests, since the responses are sent to different inbound ports.
Tools like
pinguse ICMP packets, which provide their own way to uniquely identify the calling application (a unique identifier and a sequence number).