A server-based browser system provides a server-based browser and a client system browser. The client browser reports the position of a user click on its display screen, hotspot ID, or URL to the server-side browser which retrieves a Document Object Model (DOM) model and view tree for the client and finds the location on the Web page that the user clicked on using the coordinates or hotspot ID received from the client. If there is a script associated with the location, it is executed and the resulting page location is requested from the appropriate server. If there is a URL associated with the location, it is requested from the appropriate server. The response Web page HTML definition is parsed and a DOM tree model is created which is used to create a view tree model. The server-side browser retrieves a style sheet, layout algorithms, and device constraints for the client device and lays out the view model using them onto a virtual page and determines the visual content. Textual and positional information are highly compressed and formatted into a stream and sent to the client browser which decodes the stream and displays the page to the user using the textual and positional information.