Collaborative web browsing—often called cobrowsing—is a real-time way for two or more people to view, navigate, or interact with the same web content. What they can see and do together depends on the tool: one system may synchronize a page, while another may add annotations, cursor sharing, or controls for hiding sensitive fields.
What collaborative web browsing means
“Collaborative web browsing” describes a shared web-page experience, not one standardized product or technical architecture. At its simplest, participants follow the same page or navigation. More support-oriented tools can let them work through a page together, with features such as annotations or masking.
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Zoom defines cobrowsing for its product as “a web-based visual engagement solution that allows agents and customers to securely and simultaneously navigate and interact with the same web page at the same time.” That is Zoom’s definition of its product category, not a universal technical standard. See Zoom Cobrowse SDK documentation.
How a support cobrowsing session may work
In a common support scenario, a customer agrees to share a company web page with an agent. Both can refer to the page while the agent guides the customer through a task. Depending on the implementation, they may also be able to see a mirrored cursor, highlight or annotate page areas, or resize the shared view.
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Zoom’s SDK documentation describes an agent, customer, and administrator model, and lists features including annotations and highlighting, cursor mirroring, screen resizing, masking, and audit logs. These are Zoom-specific capabilities; a particular deployment’s features depend on its product and configuration. Zoom also names complex form completion, contact-center support, e-commerce guidance, payments, and financial-customer engagement as possible use cases. Those are vendor examples, not independently demonstrated outcomes.
How cobrowsing differs from screen sharing and sending a link
Cobrowsing versus screen sharing
The distinction depends on the tools being compared. In its own product comparison, Zoom says its Cobrowse SDK is limited to a particular website and supports configurable masking, annotations, and user collaboration; it contrasts this with system-level control as a screen-sharing capability. This describes Zoom’s products, not every cobrowsing or screen-sharing system.
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Cobrowsing versus sharing a link
Sending a link gives someone a way to open a page, but it does not by itself create a real-time shared session. The W3C Web Share API lets a user share text, links, and other content to a destination they select. It is a content-sharing mechanism, rather than a definition of collaborative navigation. See the W3C Web Share API Recommendation.
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Not necessarily. WebRTC is a set of standardized browser APIs for real-time media and generic application-data exchange. It can be relevant to real-time web applications, but its specification does not define cobrowsing as a complete product or require one particular cobrowsing design. A product’s documentation is needed to establish which technologies it uses.
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The W3C WebRTC Recommendation, dated March 13, 2025, notes that WebRTC can expose information about a browser’s network context, potentially including private IP addresses, to an application or communicating party. Applications can limit exposure by selecting address candidates and using relays such as TURN. This is a WebRTC-specific consideration; it does not establish that every cobrowsing tool uses WebRTC or exposes such information.
What a participant may see—and what to check for privacy
A cobrowsing session can expose page content, including form fields, so the important question is not simply whether a tool offers masking, but what is actually visible in the session and how its controls are configured. Zoom says its SDK can mask or redact selected areas from an agent’s view. Its documentation does not justify assuming that masking is automatic or that every sensitive field is protected.
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- Check which page content is shared and whether the session is limited to a website or includes a broader screen.
- Find out whether participants can only observe, or can also annotate, mirror cursors, or interact with page elements.
- Confirm which sensitive fields or page areas are masked, who configures that behavior, and whether it has been checked for the pages in use.
- Review integration requirements and compatibility for the specific product and environment.
- If the implementation uses WebRTC, review its network-information handling as well as the page-level privacy controls.
These checks matter because cobrowsing is a category of experiences, not a guarantee of a particular consent flow, security control, or privacy outcome.
Where the term comes from
The shorthand “cobrowsing” is commonly used for collaborative web browsing. A 2001 report from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories discusses collaborative browsing in terms of synchronized navigation and scrolling, providing historical context for the idea. It should not be taken as a description of how current products work. Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, “Collaborative Web Browsing”.
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