Foundations of Unconstrained Collaborative Web Browsing with Awareness

Research has focused significantly in enabling the Web (WWW) for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). However, surfing, the most common use in the WEB, remains an individual, rather than group activity. Previous attempts to provide collaborative browsing capability constrain some users to the command of a selected user who controls the browsers of others. We adapt the technology of unconstrained distributed collaborative editors to develop unconstrained collaborative Web browsing. However, the effective collaboration is dependent on the awareness of context and group activity. We develop the history mechanisms for our solution to provide 4 types of awareness commonly discussed in the literature of CSCW.