Firefox's Autolink?
c-net: Firefox now allows users to customize Web pages they visit without the knowledge or cooperation of Web publishers. Greasemonkey can strip out ads, may have some security risks, and make the slashdot site "less ugly."
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any webpage to change it's behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a webpage's style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a webpage's design or interaction.Can anyone, who has used Greasemonkey, provide some comments regarding its capabilities?
3 Comments:
I've experimented with some Greasemonkey user scripts that some website maintainers might find most pernicious of all -- they strip out ads. For example, one in particular targets Google AdSense ads, which are actually some of the least intrusive advertisements out there.
Some scripts work better than others. For example, I tried one script that was supposed to remove or rearrange ads from Weather Underground pages and it did nothing.
I don't think I'm going to do much more with it. I'll filter out advertisements using my "behavioral advertisement filter" -- avoiding sites that advertise heavily.
Thanks Tim.
It's extremely slick, actually. Obviously, you shouldn't load GreaseMonkey scripts you don't trust, because they have total access to the content of the specified webpages. And yeah, GreaseMonkey scripts escalate the ad-blocking arms race one more step.
That said, Greasemonkey is massively cool, and quite easy for programmers to work with. I've already written a bunch of scripts to customize sites I use regularly, and it's no end of fun.
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