FlexScope: support for browsing multiple pages on the Web

Abstract

Although the information on the World Wide Web is tremendous, conventional Web browsing still consists of traversing a single Web link at a time. Such browsing can be awkward when a user wants to traverse a list of links or to view several pages of related contents side by side. Moreover, the processes of viewing a page and loading a new page have to be alternated sequentially, which deteriorates the performance of Web browsing. In this paper, we present a framework to extend the commonly available uni-browsing technique to a multi-browsing technique which provides multiple contents for a user's browsing request. Our work is based on conventional browsers with the support of multiple frames. We change the normal way in which browsers present contents to users by displaying different pages according to the links selected by the user, or the links constructed by the system according to the browsing need. After the discussion of the issues related to design and performance, we describe a multi-browsing system, which is called FlexScope, implemented over a proxy server. Applications built with FlexScope are also presented.