RCB: A Simple and Practical Framework for Real-time Collaborative Browsing.

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. In addition, these solutions usually require co-browsing participants to install special software on their computers. These requirements heavily impede the wide use of collaborative browsing over the Internet. In this paper, we propose 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 modernWeb 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. We implemented the RCB framework in the Firefox Web browser and evaluated its performance and usability. Our evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed RCB is simple, practical, helpful and easy to use.