CoLab: a flexible collaborative Web browsing tool

Collaborative Web browsing aims at extending currently available Web browsing capabilities in order to allow several users getting their browsing activity synchronized. This is a new and promising research area whose possibilities have not yet been exhaustively covered. From our point of view a collaborative Web browsing system should provide all the necessary facilities to allow users to get synchronized and desynchronized in a flexible way. Synchronization relies on a simple authorization protocol through which users can invite other users to create and release browsing synchronization relations. Additionally, special synchronization operatorsy intends to use by privileged users, are also proposed with the purpose of overriding the authorization protocol. In this paper we present our proposal for modeling and implementing a Collaborative Web Browsing system called CoLab, which has been developed using Java/spl trade/ technology; we present the main features of our current development prototype: CoLab 2.0.