The Synchronized Browsing feature allows the audience to follow along with a presenter’s web browser.

To begin a synchronized browsing presentation, log in with moderator or administrator privileges and select Synchronized Browsing under the moderator menu:

When Alice turns on synchronized browsing, the page that she is currently viewing is sent to all participants. If the whiteboard was active when Alice turned on sync browsing, then everyone is returned to the browser.

A moderator with synchronized browsing enabled appear italicized and in blue, as shown here. Note the tool tip showing that Alice is Presenting.

Now, when Alice the presenter pulls up a Google search, Bob’s browser will follow along.

As long as Alice has synchronized browsing turned on, Bob will see the same content, but he will not see the browser address bar, nor will he be able to switch back to the whiteboard:

Form Submissions and Password Protected Websites

Web form submissions are also synchronized, so it is possible for a presenter to lead participants into password protected areas. Everyone who follows along will log in to the password protected site using the same credentials as the presenter. Therefore, presenters should not enter sensitive information into the embedded browser when synchronized browsing is enabled. For security reasons, form submission data is not included in recorded presentations — only the URL of the web page is recorded.

Very often, a presenter would not need to enter a password because a cookie stored on his computer would grant access to a restricted area. Because the rest of the participants in the conference room are not likely to have the same cookie as the presenter, they will see only a login page instead of the content the presenter was attempting to show.

In most cases involving secure websites or form submissions, a more reliable way to show content is using an external browser and the Live Screencasting feature. With live screencasting, attendees receive a real-time picture of the browsing experience instead of receiving the actual URLs and data. This guarantees that they will see the same thing that the presenter sees.

Synchronized Browsing and Frame Sets

HTML frame sets cannot be reliably synchronized, therefore, synchronized browsing of content in framesets is neither recommended nor supported.  Even in cases where participants see the desired content during the live session, the recorded archive may encounter problems due to browser security restrictions on cross-frame scripting.

For best results, organize presentation materials into individual web pages that do not utilize frames. If a web presentation absolutely depends on content in frame sets, then Live Screencasting an external browser may be more reliable.

Multiple Presenters

If multiple moderators enable synchronized browsing at the same time, they will not see each other’s synchronized content. For consistent results, only on presenter at a time should turn on synchronized browsing. The second presenter should turn on synchronized browsing only after the first presenter has turned it off.

Java Applets

Web pages containing Java applets will not display properly inside the web conference room. This is due to a limitation of the Java Virtual Machine being unable to load Java inside of a browser that already is running under Java.