Curl only gets exactly what you ask it to get and it never parses the actual content—the data—that the server delivers. A browser gets data and it activates different parsers depending on what kind of content it thinks it gets. For example, if the data is HTML it will parse it to display a web page and possibly download other sub resources such as images, JavaScript and CSS files. When curl downloads HTML it will just get that single HTML resource, even if it, when parsed by a browser, would trigger a whole busload of more downloads. If you want curl to download any sub-resources as well, you need to pass those URLs to curl and ask it to get those, just like any other URLs.