
Surfly's co-browsing technology - Jenny2017
https://docs.surfly.com/introduction/the-technology.html?utm_source=hackernews
======
javajosh
Yeah, founded a startup based on this idea in 2006 or so, called WeBrowse. The
technology wasn't quite ready although I got pretty far with a prototype based
on DOMMutationListener and XHR.

Pretty clearly something like this needs to exist, and it will probably not be
nearly as useful as it's inventors think it will be. Screen-sharing is more
general, and the niche for low-entropy real-time synchronization of browser
state _feels_ pretty small right now. But who knows? Heck, I thought the iPad
was going to be a giant flop.

------
johansch
Cool! I do agree this concept is under-utilized. Best of luck!

(Heads up: if you shall ever venture to patent this tech, I think I'll be able
to present compelling prior art from like 1996. This was also a proxy-based
re-writing mechanism for co-browsing and from your description it does sound
kinda similar. It also happened to use HTML frames.)

------
egfx
Mozilla together js did this a while back..
[https://togetherjs.com](https://togetherjs.com)

------
shanemhansen
I remember customer support doing co-browsing back in 2008. Hopefully the
mechanisms have gotten a little less hacky over the years.

~~~
seanp2k2
TogetherJS as mentioned in the sibling comment is great. I got it working in a
few minutes: [https://togetherjs.com/](https://togetherjs.com/)

