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Hacking the Web with Greasemonkey
plasticmillion writes "Greasemonkey is a revolutionary Firefox extension that many feel has enormous implications for the future evolution of the web. By making it easy to write client-side scripts that modify webpages as you surf, it shifts the balance of power from content creators to content consumers. Since its inception, it has given rise to an impressive array of scripts for everything from enhancing Gmail with one-click delete functionality to preventing Hotmail from spawning new windows when you click on external links. In recent Greasemonkey news, Mark Pilgrim just published a comprehensive primer called 'Dive Into Greasemonkey', a must-read for those who want to try their hand at writing their own scripts. It should be noted that Greasemonkey is not without controversy, but this has done nothing to reduce its popularity among web programmers. Even Opera has jumped on the bandwagon with their own version of user scripts. To illustrate the principle to /.ers, I whipped up a handy little script called 'Slashdot Live Comment Tree', which lets you expand and collapse entire threads in an article's comments."
For several months, I labored under IE. 20 windows open everywhere, because it has no tabs. Even though I had managed to install Firefox (don't you love apps that don't require registry keys?), it was no help, because the applications department writes javascript that looks like it was squeezed from between Ballmer's asscheeks.
It was difficult. Took me two months of working with greasemonkey, of 3 minutes stolen here, and 5 minutes borrowed there in between calls (did I mention I'm only a phone monkey for a DSL ISP?). But in the end, not only can I use our main webapp in Firefox, it has features that the standard one doesn't. It often helps to shave up to a minute off of calltimes.
Which may be why I'm in trouble for using Firefox at that job. Dunno.
"Remember, this like this never happened before this FF extension"
Bollocks. You could write bookmarklets, or user CSS files. Hell, you could disable CSS or Javascript, you could use a browser that displays things a certain way. You could write your own browser. You could use man-in-the-middle programs to rewrite code before it reaches the browser.
The web is about information. The presentation of that information is ultimately up to the user.
Having said all that, I should point out that I am somewhat uncomfortable with the blind adoption Greasemonkey is seeing. A lot of web sites use Javascript that makes assumptions about the structure of the page. By changing the structure of the page, you're going to potentially break pages that dynamically change themselves.
The costly security report is just a money-making troll but there is one issue raised by greasemonkey that may worry a lot of content providers.
Blocking adverts is old hat but greasemonkey lets you do so much more. It offers you the potential to inject links to products from a rival vendor when browsing an online store or rewrite affiliate link ids on a page, to give two examples.
This is going to break a few business models.
Personally I'm not going to shed any tears. Many businesses have completely misunderstood the nature of the web and just seen hyperspace as somewhere else to stick up billboards. Those that can't evolve will die. But when you consider how upset certain people get if you want to just view their site in a manner they hadn't planned on, then we can definitely expect fireworks in the near future.
There's a very heated discussion between Cory Doctorow and Robert Scoble that touches on these issues at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail438.htm l about these issues, albeit in the context of Google's Autolink rather than greasemonkey.