Why these tools run in the browser too

Most DNS lookup sites work by relaying your query to their own servers, which then run the actual lookups and log them. For DNS that design is unnecessary: the large public resolvers answer DNS-over-HTTPS requests directly, with the CORS headers that let a page query them from your tab. So the tools here skip the middleman. The request your browser sends is the same request a checker backend would send, except nobody in between sees which domains you are watching, and the latency you read is your latency, not a data center's. The subnet calculators go one step further: subnet math needs no network at all, so the addresses you type never leave the page, which matters when they describe your internal topology.

What a browser can and cannot see

Honest limits, because DNS checker sites tend to blur them: a browser cannot open port 53, so classic resolvers without DoH, including your ISP's, stay out of reach. And the big public resolvers are anycast networks, meaning each one gives a single answer from the site nearest to you rather than one answer per country. What the browser can do is compare seven independent resolver networks, read the real TTL countdowns from their caches, and query the record types that matter in a migration: A and AAAA for the switch itself, MX and TXT for mail, NS and SOA for the delegation. That covers the question people bring to these tools, which is not "what does DNS look like from Nairobi" but "has my change landed yet".