Ah yes, the joys of an open platform bringing innovation back to the web. It’s really a wonder to see all the cool extensions hackers are creating for FireFox. A few weeks ago I installed Google Preview, which provides very cool tumbnails of webpages on Google. Today, I found out about GreaseMonkey which lets you add custom scripts for different webpages. For example, Fidelity still has some b0rkage in their login on Firefox in Linux (it doesn’t recognize X11 as a platform so things don’t quite work right, like research of stocks and funds). I can go and hack together a script and it will automagically fix the site for me. One could imagine some cool extensions for web based games, ala the cool old school Trade Wars 2002 scripts for Telix.
But I didn’t just stumble upon (which is another extension, I haven’t played with it yet though) GreaseMonkey. It was discovered because I found Mark Pilgrim’s great new script called Butler. This little guy hacks up the search results for Google and removes all the ads and provides additional links to interesting sites. Most cool. I’m cotinually amazed by the innovation that comes out folks hacking on FireFox. I feel very meek in comparasion to their geekiness.