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.