A notch above a monkey

WTF?

Disgusting . What does it take to get rid of this incompetent egotistical idiot?

Tweaking pages

I recently came back from Berlin, where I publicly asked John Lily why haven’t they integrated Greasemonkey into Firefox . Wrong question can hardly lead to right answer. What I really wanted to know was:

“Why doesn’t Mozilla integrate Greasemonkey-LIKE functionality in a browser?”

Browser is at the farthest reach of web creators. It’s them who decide how a page will look like when it gets loaded and what visitors will be able to do with it. User actions that were not anticipated by page designers are limited to printing a page, tweaking its display a bit with user style sheets, seeing its source and copying text elsewhere.

Browser is also an application that is loaded on someone’s computer and belongs to him, as much as software can belong to somebody in EULA-infested world. Not every browser is equal, but pretty much all of them limit what you can do with page (beyond its creators intentions)  to above actions. The real question than for me becomes:

“To whom does a browser belong to?”

One reason why I love Greasemonkey is that it enabled me to fix and change pages that I find lacking. Not every page has navigation where it should be and lots of them display parts of text in illegibly small letters. It can also help me plug different services together. It is indeed geeky, as Brady Forrest observed, but useful implementation doesn’t need to be. I find Platypus extension a good first step to how a browser could further empower its users in customizing pages even further to their needs.

I thought about downsides to this since Thursday and I’m failing to find anything substantial.

Namibia

I’m back from much needed and very appreciated vacation, which I didn’t publicize in advance in an old-fashioned hope not to give tips to burglars. Sensible or not, we still have our stuff.

There are places where I’ve been, places where I wouldn’t like to go again and places like Namibia , where you ask yourself, how many times will you make it back before you die. Many eloquent people have tried to describe appeal of this beautiful country and its fantastic people, so I won’t even try where so many have failed before, but if you have a chance to visit, you really shouldn’t miss it.

I did see something I would like to see replicated here in Slovenia. Every government car in Namibia has a green registration plate with 3 letters that either describe part of the government it belongs to, or have GRN as a catchall category. Here, only police and defense forced have their own plates, but it would be really great if every car bought by state would have a plate that would clearly mark to which department it belongs. This way taxpayers could get an impression on how many cars out there are paid by them and what kind. More transparency can only be good.

In other news I will be giving a talk at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on 23rd titled “Easy Deployment of Site-Extensions with a Browser Plugin”. If Berlin is too far, then you can also hear it this coming Wednesday at 19.00 in Kiberpipa at our regular Spletne urice talks.