Firefox Greasemonkey Extension
If you're using Firefox instead of Explorer to surf the web, you can install an extension called Greasemonkey. This allows the user to change specific sites they visit. The site that shows up in your browser will look as if that site's creators had intended it to be that way. Different scripts are written every day for you to download: Take all the ads off of Google. Or display competitor's prices on every book you look at in Amazon. Or put very useful persistent searches in Gmail. Or put a link on every movie in Netflix to a BitTorrent download of that movie. You might detect a common thread: most of these uses for Greasemonkey circumvent or disrupt the business model of people making money with the web. Perhaps by using a Greasemonkey script on a site you would be helping to kill that site's viability? Give some thought to each application of Greasemonkey before using it.
One technical problem with Greasemonkey is that certain wrongheaded types of scripts for it, such as generating a reputation on every site you visit by going out to every other site related to it, can generate ridiculous un-necessary web traffic for which there does not exist enough resources. The way I see it, this is analogous to every internet user becoming a reverse spammer. Use Greasemonkey with care-- but there is no question that this is a whole new web.
Comments
wormquartet on May. 11, 2005 12:21 PM
FYI, "Firefox Greasemonkey Extension" sounds like a spam subject line.
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