Firefox Users Monkey With the Web

Found on Wired on Monday, 16 May 2005
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While Greasemonkey is still only used by Firefox users on the bleeding edge, Willison sees the extension as a harbinger of a change in the web's power dynamics.

Greasemonkey was originally written by Aaron Boodman, who wrote the program in December 2004 to amuse his friends and found himself pleasantly surprised when it grew into a cult hit.

While quite a few scripts simply block ads, Mark Pilgrim, a coder known for his work on website accessibility and XML, thinks the coolest -- and most important -- scripts are the ones that mesh sites together.

"There's a script targeting Amazon pages that lets you know if a book you are looking at on Amazon is available at your local library," Pilgrim said. "Think about that. That's amazing, and it happens automatically. You configure it once for your library, and Greasemonkey goes and gets the data."

Well, rewriting websites isn't that new; anyone running his own proxy can do that on the fly. All that brings up an interesting idea: let's assume you have signed up with several advertisers (like Google Adsense); now you could let your proxy rewrite the websites, and replace the ID's of others with your own; this would effectively steal impressions (and your clicks). Now, some might say that the advertiser might simply close your account; ok, then why not do the same trick with your competitor's ID and kill his account?