In the last installment I wrote about Firefox and the AdBlock plugin. Those two combined are enough for most people. But there are those of us who demand more. We want to be able to customize our browsing experience to the maximum. Fortunately for us there are a couple of Firefox extensions that make it possible. They are Greasemonkey and Platypus. What Greasemonkey does sounds simple. It lets you add user scripts to webpages. What that means in practice is that you can totally modify the way a page appears in your browser. You can lop off entire unwanted sections, and just retain the content you want. You can change the behavior of the page. For example, you can disable all redirection scripts or allow right-clicks on images from pages that try to disable them. You can even integrate content from one webpage into another -- my favorite example is the RIAA-Radar Greasemonkey script which integrates with Amazon to provide info about whether a particular album was released by an RIAA member or not right on the product page! It's awe-inspiring to watch it work. The catch? You have to know how to write Greasemonkey scripts (in DHTML). There is, however, a big library of pre-written scripts (some designed to work with specific sites, others with all sites). But what if there is no pre-written script for what you want and you don't have the time to learn to write your own scripts? Well, that's where Platypus comes in. It's a toolbar that allows you to slice and dice a particular page to your liking in the Firefox window itself. Once you have the page looking the way you like, just hit Ctrl-S and pow, it auto-generates the DHTML script which you can just pull right into Greasemonkey. I was amazed at how easy it was!
Greasemonkey and Platypus are not for everyone. Most people can probably live without the customization they provide. But for the true power user there's nothing like the kind of web browsing experience you can tailor to your liking.