May 17, 2005 | Yes, Some Browsers Have Hoods

The code kids are at it again.

This time they are whipping up scripts that mess with websites, but like in the old game of "I'm not touching you," there's not much websites can do since the scripts run inside the Firefox browser. They automatically give Gmail a delete button, force the browser to always use a secure site to log into Yahoo! mail, reconfigure stupid web page layouts and mash-up data from various sites to create whole new functions on websites.

My favorite: I took columnist John Udell's library script for Amazon and jiggered it around to work with the San Francisco Public Library. Now every time I look up a book on Amazon, the script will automatically search for the ISBN in the public library and post a link that says either "Hey, this book is available at the library" or "This book is due back on [date]." Udell first made this as a , but the script is cooler since it does the lookup automatically, without you having to click a button on the to launch it.

My localized version of his script can be found here. (Install notes at end of blog entry)

My story is here.

In a modern twist on the hot of old, Firefox users are pimping the web, one browser at a time.

They've added a delete button and permanent search folders to, made their browsers show only print pages of online news stories, reconfigured all the content on a popular music website and removed Reuters stories on the Michael Jackson story from online newsreader.

Simon, a computer science student in England who's a fan of Paul Graham's online essays on hacking and programming, grew frustrated with having to scroll from Graham's paragraphs to his footnotes and back again.

So, armed with a little, wrote a program that automatically generated links between the paragraphs and the footnotes. A couple of weeks later, Graham wrote to say he would soon start adding the links for everyone.

That change was made possible by, a Firefox extension that allows users to load custom scripts that modify a specific website anytime they visit it.

While is still only used by Firefox users on the bleeding edge, sees the extension as a harbinger of a change in the web's power dynamics.

" enables people to remix the web," said. "You are giving control of people's browsers back to users.

"There's always a balance between what a website designer wants people to be able to do and what they are actually doing, and Greasemonkey swings it very firmly in the direction of the user."

As a funny side note, Rael Dornfest, O'Reilly Media's CTO, pimped his own ride, forgot about it and announced on the O'Reilly blog that Google had new features.

He quickly found out that it was just Greasemonkey.

As Rael points out, extreme customization, such as Greasemonkey allows, does raise some questions about a shared Internet experience.

But then again, I think those questions are not really relevant. Google is not ABC or CBS or NBC.

In fact, none of us have ever used or will ever use the same Internet.

(Hint: if you want to change the LibraryLookup to your local library, 1) open this file in your browser then save it locally 2) open it with a text editor such as Notepad, 3) find your local library's default ISBN search string and copy it in as the new UrlPattern 4) change the name of the library 5) check the text string your library uses to say a book is in (SF uses "check shelf" to mean "available") and enter it verbatim, 5) save the file locally and 6) load it into Greasemonkey using the Tools menu)

Posted by Ryan Singel at May 17, 2005 10:49 AM

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