A Proxy-Based Infrastructure for Web Application Sharing and Remote Collaboration on Web Pages

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.