There’s a really neat extension for Firefox called “GreaseMonkey” (http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/). It’s really quite ingenious. Basically it allows you to make customizations to web sites on the fly on just your client browser. So for example, say that you want a link to your email account to appear on www.cnn.com. You could edit it so that HTML that’s received from www.cnn.com is filtered and a link to your webmail is inserted before it renders it on your screen. It’s all seamless and it’s really really cool. They have a number of “overlays” like this for Gmail which allow you to remove the ads that are displayed, add features, and other neat stuff. Even just for a site like Slashdot you can change things if you don’t like to see a lot of the junk that’s displayed or whatever you want.
It’s capable of being used malciously. Obviously, it could do very bad things if you installed scripts from untrusted sources. Overall though, it’s a very neat thing and a REALLY neat new web browsing experience. I haven’t been this impressed in a while… Here’s a huge list of GreaseMonkey scripts… They have a couple for CNN (remove ads, remove sidebar, etc.). Just install the GreaseMonkey extension from the link above and then browse to the list of User
Scripts. Right click on the appropriate link to the script (with a .js extension) and click “Install User Script). All it takes is a refresh to Apply the settings.
