Taking the Net in Your Own Hands

Ever since Firefox came out, I've been waiting to see where the "community" will take it, and where Firefox itself will take the internet. In fact, I was so enthused, that after a long time, I took to writing regular articles again, and wrote a "Guide to Firefox" with the first level of evolutions for the popular open source browser. I detailed how you could personalize the browser to behave the way you'd like, to look the way you'd like, and to work at speeds you'd like. People loved it!

But there, you're customizing only a small part of the whole web experience; you can only customize the "window" through which you see the world, not the world itself. We humans like to personalize the world we live in; at office, we put tiny things in our cubicle that would make it look more personal; at a restaurant, we personalize our favorite preparation with a certain flavoring, or add a dash of lime to it to give it that extra zing. Personalizing the world makes it that much more livable, enjoyable. Imagine the frustration of people when they can't do the same to the Internet. I'm sure each of you have a certain favorite website, where you'd like to see a certain feature added (or removed), and the site's administrators just don't have the resources, or the will to make that change for you.

We can see examples of this right here on Techtree; quite a few forums and Ask Techtree users have been asking to make web links active so that users can click on them at once, rather than having to copy-paste them (we've chosen to avoid that as of now because of many attempted phishing scams on various other forums), or users asking for something as simple as a look-n-feel change to the way Ask Techtree's reply box appears.

How about taking things in your own hands?

Take a look at these tools; Greasemonkey, and Platypus. Both are Mozilla / Firefox plugins that let you browse the web "actively". Here's what the Platypus website says about active browsing: "...In active browsing, the client browser actively modifies content before display. Instead of accepting web pages "as is", active browsers transparently modify, delete and edit web pages according to specific user needs."

These two plugins let you take a website's functionality in your own hands. With Platypus, you can remove parts of the page you don't wish to see, or move them elsewhere on the page; change the style and format of the page, modify links and button behavior, or just add new stuff by inserting your own HTML or Javascript code. The possibilities are endless; you could make a "fixed resolution" website expand to fill your own resolution. You could add a new "delete" button to GMail, which shortcuts the entire procedure of sending a message / thread to the trash, and then emptying it from there. You could remove elements from a site's homepage which you're not interested in (e.g., the box that shows my editorial on the techtree homepage), or keep only those you're interested in (e.g. Tech Trivia). You could even make all text with "http://", or "www." in them appear as properly formatted links. Basically, you could do anything that the site's administrators could do, and all from your own side, without having to ask them for permission. Then you could just go to Greasemonkey's site, and share your custom script with other users.

And these plugins aren't even in "stable release" yet; I can see their usage getting a lot more pervasive when they reach a stable version, and are maybe embedded into Firefox's core itself, to allow for faster, easier, more efficient customization of webpages, and simple "right-click" searching for customization possibilities of a certain website you're visiting.

Website makers; watch out, the users are taking over this joint (or maybe it's good for the both of us, we'll see).