Thanks to Asa for the tip-off – this extension sounds like it is going to be very big. By adding WYSIWYG editing, it dramatically lowers the barriers to creating personal Greasemonkey scripts. I expect to see a reignition of the debate between ‘HTML is a presentation layer and not meant to be altered by the browser’ people and the ‘it’s on my browser for my personal use so I’ll do anything I damn well want with it’ people.
If the extension catches on, I bet webmasters who need an unchanged page to secure their profit streams are going to resort to dynamically obfuscating their HTML code – inserting random anchors and alt text and so forth to ensure a loaded page never has the same source code twice. That’ll ensure these Greasemonkey scripts break – but at a great cost to the clarity of the ‘Net. Still, I don’t see this developing any other way… we’re in for a fight between those wanting to change pages through the browser and those wanting to guard their pages’ integrity. Interesting times.
