Want evidence of end user control?

April 3, 2009 By 8 Comments

If you really want to underline the way control is now being shared with an ever greater number of people historically know as your ‘audience’, then show people the increasing rise of Firefox browser usage – then show them Greasemonkey.

Now Firefox isn’t the most used browser globally – Internet Explorer still rules, and Google’s Chrome certainly has some advantages and enthusiastic adopters. But whether or not Firefox ever dominates the browser market, the influence of the open source approach, add-ons and plug-ins is undeniable. It’s the reason that many people, including myself, might use Chrome for certain tasks for speed, but can’t give up the utility of plugins which offer everything from easy ways to see the way a page is coded, to Swedish spellchecking, mouse gestures and more.

But why is Greasemonkey so incredibly important?

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allows users to install scriptson-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script. Greasemonkey can be used for adding new functions to web pages (for example, embedding price comparison in Amazon.com web pages), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple webpages, and numerous other purposes. From Wikipedia.

So that means:

You can spend as much time and money as you like on designing your webpage, but if I want to disable elements, change the layout, or do whatever I like, I can.

For instance, Facebook’s redesign angered many people – so if you want to hide the Highlights sidebar, just install one of three Greasemonkey options.

Or you can just emulate the old Facebook design.

And what’s really interesing?

As a website owner/publisher, I’m not aware of any way you’d know this was happening via analytics (And I’ve asked a few metrics/analytics types before posting), and you wouldn’t know what users are adding to your site to improve their experience, and possibly conversion rates.

(If you do know ways to track any of that information automatically, I’d love you to share it in the comments.)

Your users would though.

Resources:

You can keep up with the Greasemonkey blog at Greasespot, and find Userscripts for it at Userscripts.org. Please do keep in mind that you’re installing code which may in a very small amount of cases have been created by people who aren’t 100% lovely, so do some research before adding new scripts. Or just don’t blame this post if you kill the internet by accident.

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  • http://www.carrentals.co.uk/blog Gareth Crew

    I’ve not used Greasemonkey before, so will try it out.

    As for Firefox, I don’t think I can used any other browser now, with its opensource add-ons.

    However, as you say a lot of people still use IE and i came unstuck, tagging up an article in Firefox, and missing out some BRs, which meant it looked fine for FF but mad in IE.

    That was annoying – everyone should change to FF to make my life easier. Or something like that ;)

  • http://www.carrentals.co.uk/blog Gareth Crew

    I’ve not used Greasemonkey before, so will try it out.

    As for Firefox, I don’t think I can used any other browser now, with its opensource add-ons.

    However, as you say a lot of people still use IE and i came unstuck, tagging up an article in Firefox, and missing out some BRs, which meant it looked fine for FF but mad in IE.

    That was annoying – everyone should change to FF to make my life easier. Or something like that ;)

  • http://www.guava.co.uk Mark Edmondson

    Greasemonkey is great, it takes the power of usability away from the deisgner and to the user – don’t like all the ads on MySpace? Let GM take them out for you. With things like twitter searches in Google you can even emulate multi-billion dollar take overs. :)

  • http://www.guava.co.uk Mark Edmondson

    Greasemonkey is great, it takes the power of usability away from the deisgner and to the user – don’t like all the ads on MySpace? Let GM take them out for you. With things like twitter searches in Google you can even emulate multi-billion dollar take overs. :)

  • http://www.sellingmagicbeans.co.uk/blog pjeedai

    I run greasemonkey with the unf*ck facebook script and the twitter search, flickr search, wikipedia add-ons for google.

    can be a bit flakey and another overhead to a firefox install that is terminally obese with all the add-ons i run.

    but frequent updates to the script mean it improves almost daily so i persist. mind you it drives the wife mad as no website does what she expects.

    i think the point is this is part of the bigger picture – its not just the UI we can control but where the data comes from, hows its fiddled with (Yahoo Pipes, Dapper etc) en route, who helps filter it, on which format(s) we consume it and when and where this happens.

    at the moment you still need to knuckle down and get your hands a little dirty in some code and a lot of sign ups to services to handle individual roles in the process. thats too much of a barrier for the middle majority as it stands right now.

    but the general public are getting slowly but surely more accepting and more able at the same time as more people are making efforts to link things automagically for them.

    Live (especially Mesh), Google ecosystem, Facebooks expanding features, Flickr, Zoho for business etc increasingly bring functionality that has been available for years – photo sharing via FTP, remote desktop and remote storage/apps. This is not new – mainframes used to run sessions to remote terminals when Bill Gates was in school. The difference is that these are close to plug and play for the public.

    These are not things for uber geeks any more. my auntie is on facebook, my dad flickr and so on

    the acceptable version of technology for the masses – but based on the basic tools which have been the world of network and IT pros for years – is now a quick click and an install to transform the experience.

    we shouldn’t just be in awe of the power this brings us or what will change in the world when the power of little tricks like greasemonkey, no script and the sheer utility of Remember the Milk or otherinbox is made palatable to the general public.

    no that in itself is daunting and terrifying.

    but i cant wait to see the next generation do something with the mature version of the tech having grown up with it being nothing to be afraid of…

  • http://www.sellingmagicbeans.co.uk/blog pjeedai

    I run greasemonkey with the unf*ck facebook script and the twitter search, flickr search, wikipedia add-ons for google.

    can be a bit flakey and another overhead to a firefox install that is terminally obese with all the add-ons i run.

    but frequent updates to the script mean it improves almost daily so i persist. mind you it drives the wife mad as no website does what she expects.

    i think the point is this is part of the bigger picture – its not just the UI we can control but where the data comes from, hows its fiddled with (Yahoo Pipes, Dapper etc) en route, who helps filter it, on which format(s) we consume it and when and where this happens.

    at the moment you still need to knuckle down and get your hands a little dirty in some code and a lot of sign ups to services to handle individual roles in the process. thats too much of a barrier for the middle majority as it stands right now.

    but the general public are getting slowly but surely more accepting and more able at the same time as more people are making efforts to link things automagically for them.

    Live (especially Mesh), Google ecosystem, Facebooks expanding features, Flickr, Zoho for business etc increasingly bring functionality that has been available for years – photo sharing via FTP, remote desktop and remote storage/apps. This is not new – mainframes used to run sessions to remote terminals when Bill Gates was in school. The difference is that these are close to plug and play for the public.

    These are not things for uber geeks any more. my auntie is on facebook, my dad flickr and so on

    the acceptable version of technology for the masses – but based on the basic tools which have been the world of network and IT pros for years – is now a quick click and an install to transform the experience.

    we shouldn’t just be in awe of the power this brings us or what will change in the world when the power of little tricks like greasemonkey, no script and the sheer utility of Remember the Milk or otherinbox is made palatable to the general public.

    no that in itself is daunting and terrifying.

    but i cant wait to see the next generation do something with the mature version of the tech having grown up with it being nothing to be afraid of…

  • http://www.bauermedia.co.uk Pablo

    Re: Detection.

    The server knows what HTML it sent you and it can then compare that to the current HTML you are viewing. It would be similar to techniques used to “unblock” ad blocking scripts.

  • http://www.bauermedia.co.uk Pablo

    Re: Detection.

    The server knows what HTML it sent you and it can then compare that to the current HTML you are viewing. It would be similar to techniques used to “unblock” ad blocking scripts.