Is an HTTP request synchronous or asynchronous?

HTTP requests are inherently synchronous. When a client sends an HTTP request to a server, it waits for the server to respond before continuing with other tasks. This is the standard behavior of most web browsers and other HTTP clients—they send a request and then “block” further processing on that thread until the server’s response is received. However, web developers often use techniques such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to handle HTTP requests asynchronously in web applications, allowing the client to continue interacting with the web page while the HTTP request is processed in the background.