Co-Browsing Dynamic Web Pages

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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.