Collaborative browsing, also known as co-browsing, allows multiple users to access the same web pages in a simultaneous manner and collaboratively fulfill certain tasks. As a useful and attractive technique, co-browsing has a wide range of important applications such as online training and customer supporting. Existing co-browsing solutions must use either a specific collaborative platform, a modified web server, or a dedicated proxy to coordinate the browsing activities between web users. Besides, these solutions usually require users to install special software on their computers. These requirements heavily impede the wide use of collaborative browsing among Internet users. We propose to design and develop an efficient framework for Real-time Collaborative Browsing. This framework is a pure browser-based solution. It leverages the power of Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) techniques and the extensibility of modern web browsers for performing co-browsing. Our objective is to achieve real-time collaboration among web users, without the involvement of any third-party platforms, servers, or proxies. The proposed framework will enable fine-grained co-browsing on arbitrary web sites and web pages. The success of this project will provide significant research contributions to on-line collaboration. Our research results will be disseminated to industry and academia through high-quality publications and the development of prototypes. The educational aspect of this project focuses on integrating education and research activities, and enhancing the undergraduate and graduate system and networking curricula.
In this project, we have developed a simple and practical framework?for Real-time Collaborative Browsing (RCB). This?RCB framework is a pure browser-based solution. It?leverages the power of Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript?and XML) techniques and the end-user extensibility of?modern Web browsers to support co-browsing. RCB enables?real-time collaboration among Web users without?the involvement of any third-party platforms, servers, or?proxies. It allows users to perform fine-grained high?quality co-browsing on arbitrary websites and webpages. A user who wants to host a?collaborative web session only needs to install an RCB-Agent plug-in. Users who want to?join a collaborative session just use their regular JavaScript-enabled web browsers, and?nothing needs to be installed or configured. End-user extensibility is an important feature?supported by popular web browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer. Thus, it is?feasible to implement and run the RCB-Agent plug-in on these browsers. Meanwhile,?currently 95% of web users turn on JavaScript in their browsers and all popular web?browsers support Ajax techniques. As a result, joining a collaborative web session is no?more difficult than using a regular browser to visit a regular web site. The simplicity and?practicability of RCB bring a significant usability advantage to co-browsing participants, ?especially in online training and customer support applications. RCB is efficient because?co-browsing participants are directly connected to the user who hosts the session, and?RCB is also safe because there is no third-party involvement in the co-browsing?activities. The research contributions of the developed RCB framework can be summarized in three?aspects: 1. Ubiquitous co-browsing: since no specific platform, server, or proxy is needed, co-browsing can be performed in many different places via any type of network connections?such as Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or even USB-connected virtual network. 2. Arbitrary co-browsing: co-browsing can be applied to almost all kinds of web servers and web pages. Web contents hosted on HTTP or HTTPS web servers (including session-protected or unprotected web pages) can all be synchronized to co-browsing participants?by RCB-Agent. Our RCB-Agent can also send cached contents including image and?Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files to co-browsing participants, and hence, improve?performance and accessibility. 3. Fine-grained co-browsing: co-browsed web elements and coordinated user actions?can be very fine-grained. Since RCB-Agent is designed as a browser plug-in, the seamless?browser-integration enables RCB-Agent to fully control what web page contents can be?shared and what actions should be allowed to co-browsing participants, leading to full?functional high quality co-browsing. Co-browsing has a wide range of important applications. For example, instructors can?illustrate online materials to distance learning students, business representatives can provide?live online technical support to their customers, and regular web users can conduct online?searching or shopping with their friends. Our RCB framework has the great?potential to be widely used, and will serve as a catalyst for the large-scale deployment of online collaboration toolkits.
