why do websites have different endings (com, net, org) what do they mean?
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To the computers the name make no difference – if it’s .org or .com does not matter at all. It’s a human organization that started with US institutions forgetting that a world outside the US existed but did find that different rules/idea would apply to commercial organizations than to government and hence organized the names so we could have different human processes to manage how names would be allocated.
As the internet has grown this very fixed structure was replaced with a very wide set of names managed by a lot of different organizations from countries and sub-divisions within countries based on what it find necessary. And then there’s all the .info, .news etc. that simply means you have competing companies selling you domain names, which in _theory_ would lower prices. Unfortunately, because TLDs like .com have existed since the inception they often go for a lot higher price – even though it doesn’t matter for how the internet works.
Browsers will try to “guess” the TLD so using a TLD that is known/used by the browser would be helpful, or you as user would have to type the whole name dots and all, for the hostname to be found.
So the TL;DR is that the name indicates WHO manages what domain names can be created. There may be different rules for different TLDs, just like there are different prices.
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