The web is a-buzz with hot technology right now, with mother Google seemingly leading the charge to re-invent, re-engineer and imagineer all kinds of apps. But what happens when the power shifts to the user, through the use of creative browser add-ons which let you change pages you’re viewing? The answer is, potentially, a lot!
Well a sneak peak of a few ‘user annotation’ or ‘user scripting’ tools may well help us to understand where this is heading. Just imagine being able to customise any web page you visit to your own requirements and you kind of get the picture. In effect we create our own custom browser.
- Greasemonkey. Firefox extension which ‘lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior.’
- Proxomitron. ‘If you know some HTML, you’ll find the Proxomitron allows you to personally customize just about any web page you view. You’ll no longer be at some web-master’s tender mercy.’
- Opera User Javascript. ‘User JavaScript is loaded and executed as if it were a part of the page that you visit. It is run immediately before the first script on the page… User JavaScript is able to do anything that any normal script is able to do, including things like detecting events, creating variables, creating functions and reading the cookies that are stored for that page.’
- Outfoxed. Firefox extension that adds trusted metadata from friends to sites you visit. ‘In a nutshell, I’m exploring ways for you to use your network of trusted friends to determine what’s good, bad, and dangerous on the internet.’
