Abstract
When people collaborate remotely, the WWW is part of the shared resources they use together. However, web pages do not offer support for collaborative interaction such as viewing or influencing another user’s browsing session – additional software needs to be installed for these features. In this paper, we present UsaProxy 2, an HTTP proxy that allows the same web page or application to be viewed and used in two browsers at the same time, without client-side software installation. This includes a visualisation of the remote user’s mouse pointer, scrolling, keyboard input, following links to other pages and more. Our open-source proxy modifies HTML pages before delivering them to the browsers. The added JavaScript code provides session monitoring and shared browsing facilities. We conducted an experimental evaluation which shows that our approach works for different scenarios, such as shopping online and exchanging ideas on what to buy. The user study showed that our approach is accepted and liked by users. Combined with audio or text chat communication, it provides a very useful tool for informal, ad-hoc collaboration.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Ahuja, S.R., Ensor, J.R., Lucco, S.E.: A comparison of application sharing mechanisms in real-time desktop conferencing systems. ACM SIGOIS Bulletin 11(2-3), 238–248 (1990)
Atterer, R., Wnuk, M., Schmidt, A.: Knowing the User’s Every Move – User Activity Tracking for Website Usability Evaluation and Implicit Interaction. In: WWW2006. Proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland (May 2006)
Cabri, G., Leonardi, L., Zambonelli, F.: Supporting Cooperative WWW Browsing: a Proxy-based Approach. In: Proceedings of the 7th Euromicro Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Madeira (P), pp. 138–145 (February 1999)
Esenther, A.W.: Instant Co-Browsing: Lightweight Real-time Collaborative Web Browsing. In: WWW2002. Proceedings of the 11th World Wide Web Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (May 7-11, 2002)
Gianoutsos, S., Grundy, J.: Collaborative work with the World Wide Web: Adding CSCW support to a Web Browser. In: Proceedings of the Oz-CSCW 1996. DSTC Technical Workshop Series, pp. 14–21. University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1996)
Greenberg, S., Roseman, M.: GroupWeb: A WWW Browser as Real Time Groupware. In: CHI 1996 Short Papers: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (April 13–18, 1996)
Han, R., Perret, V., Naghshineh, M.: WebSplitter: A Unified XML Framework for Multi-Device Collaborative Web Browsing. In: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States (2000)
Jacobs, S., Gebhardt, M., Kethers, S., Rzasa, W.: Filling HTML forms simultaneously: CoWeb – architecture and functionality. In: WWW1996. Proceedings of the 5th World Wide Web Conference, Paris, France (May 6–10, 1996)
Kobayashi, M., Shinozaki, M., Sakairi, T., Touma, M., Daijavad, S., Wolf, C.: Collaborative customer services using synchronous Web browser sharing. In: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Seattle, Washington, United States, pp. 99–109. ACM Press, New York (1998)
Puglia, S., Carter, R., Jain, R.: MultECommerce: a distributed architecture for collaborative shopping on the WWW. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM conference on Electronic commerce, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, pp. 215–224. ACM Press, New York (2000)
Sidler, G., Scott, A., Wolf, H.: Collaborative Browsing in the World Wide Web. In: Proceedings of the 8th Joint European Networking Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland (May 1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Atterer, R., Schmidt, A., Wnuk, M. (2007). A Proxy-Based Infrastructure for Web Application Sharing and Remote Collaboration on Web Pages. In: Baranauskas, C., Palanque, P., Abascal, J., Barbosa, S.D.J. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2007. INTERACT 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4662. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74796-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74796-3_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74794-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74796-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)