Co-browsing dynamic web pages

Abstract

Collaborative browsing, or co-browsing, is the co-navigation of the web with other people at-a-distance, supported by software that takes care of synchronizing the browsers. Current state-of-the-art solutions are able to do co-browsing of "static web pages", and do not support the synchronization of JavaScript interactions. However, currently many web pages use JavaScript and Ajax techniques to create highly dynamic and interactive web applications. In this paper, we describe two approaches for co-browsing that both support the synchronization of the JavaScript and Ajax interactions of dynamic web pages. One approach is based on synchronizing the output of the JavaScript engine by sending over the changes made on the DOM tree. The other approach is based on synchronizing the input of the JavaScript engine by synchronizing UI events and incoming data. Since the latter solution offers a better user experience and is more scalable, it is elaborated in more detail. An important aspect of both approaches is that they operate at the DOM level. Therefore, the client-side can be implemented in JavaScript and no browser extensions are required. To the best of the authors' knowledge this is the first DOM-level co-browsing solution that also enables co-browsing of the dynamic interaction parts of web pages. The presented co-browsing solution has been implemented in a research demonstrator which allows users to do co-browsing of web-applications on browser-based networked televisions.

Veil: Private Browsing Semantics Without Browser-side Assistance

“…Collaborative browsing frameworks [34], [52] allow multiple users with different browsers to simultaneously interact with a shared view of a web page. Like these frameworks, Veil's DOM hiding mode has to synchronize the GUI inputs and rendering activity that belong to a canonical version of a page.…”

Lightweight support for collaborative web browsing through spreadvector

“…In collaborative settings, these circumstances make it difficult for users to check if remote users are seeing the same content or to direct the focus of remote users to a specific position in a document. While related work made use of more heavyweight synchronisation approaches like proxies [4] and video streams [7] to support collaboration mechanisms like telepointers, SpreadVector uses an elegant combination of heuristics and the exchange of hash signatures between clients to allow for robust annotation positioning. This way SpreadVector allows users to remotely highlight selections and share annotations between Web browsers on the same Web page.…”

Exploiting single-user web applications for shared editing

“…The output synchronization mechanism was devised by Lowet and Goergen [23] and the authors propose to enrich existing single-user web applications with co-browsing capabilities. A reference browser records all DOM manipulations and sends them to all client browsers which replay the DOM manipulations.…”

“…The approach reduces development effort since the generic collaboration engine may be reused by arbitrary applications. Another approach tailored for web applications was proposed by Lowet and Goergen [23] which was especially suited for co-browsing scenarios. The task of synchronizing multiple views was tackled through an output synchronization mechanism, i.e.…”

“…the collaboration adapter leverages application-specific APIs, the reuse of the adapter is not permitted and a re-implementation for each application is required. Second, the output synchronization mechanism [23] lacks a conflict resolution scheme. Consequently, shared editing scenarios where multiple users edit the same document simultaneously are not supported.…”