the present invention is directed towards to computerized social networks and e - commerce and facilitating ad - hoc screen sharing and co - browsing between users of a social network . the collaborative web browsing system has document object model element interaction detection . the collaborative browsing method comprises a server computer having a shopping with a friend server engine coupled to a database , a swaf client engine coupled to the swaf server engine and a plurality of client computers each having a web browser program that runs the swaf client engine . the web browser program does not include a collaboration plug - in .