Another wonder-feature Firefox web browser extension is Greasemonkey. This addon gives unprecedented power to web surfers, and could be the bane of their life to website authors.

The deal is this: when you go to read a web page, the Internet doesn't magically transmit a photo-esque lights and sound image to your computer for display. Rather it sends a bunch of boring code, mostly revolving around HTML. The web browser program on your computer reads this code and builds up the visual representation of the page to display to lucky you - the end user. So what? Well, there is nothing to stop you altering the code before it is displayed - which is exactly what this Greasemonkey does.

Wielding the mighty power of DHTML the Greasemonkey extension allows you to run various preprogrammed scripts on web pages to dramatically (or if you prefer subtlety, "slighty") alter their appearance before you get to see them. Essentially you can rewrite the web pages that other people have laboured for hours over, to fix their bugs, remove their annoyances and in all manner of ways make them more useful to you.

Might sound a bit tricky, but it's not really due to the wealth of scripts that other people have kindly written for you to use in Greasemonkey. If those thousands of scripts don't serve your needs, or you need to prove your geek-hood, there are plenty of helpful hints out there to help you write your own, including Dive Into Greasemonkey, a free online book.

Greasy GooglePure GooglePotential uses? Well, removing ads seems to be a favourite, even the cunning inline textual ones. See the images in this article showing a Google search with and without the Greasemonkey script Google Sponsored Link Remover. This is only the beginning; you can reformat sites to make them more readable, you can perform clever stuff like having an item on Amazon display any more bargainous prices from other sites and so on; your (slightly nerdy) imagination is probably the limit.

So why should it bother site owners? Well, firstly all their "hard work" (ha!) can be undone by your messing around with their stuff, making you see what you want to see and not what they want you to see. Amazon would probably rather you weren't automatically looking at competitor's extra-cheap prices whilst reading their site. You could add features to sites that would prefer you to pay them for that feature. Their web developers make Brave New Changes, and maybe you won't even see them.

This also has big implications for that most annoying sputum of webpages - adverts. OK, they are evil incarnate, especially noisy Flash ones, or subtly integrated ones that try tricking you into thinking they are legit. The Poorhouse is always disheartened when capitalism wreaks its evil mind-altering persuasive ways in any public sphere of life. However, a large part of "free" Internet content in the real world is actually funded by adverts. Not least Google (at least in the old days, who knows what they're up to now?) et al. If you have outgoing webcosts that you fund via ads, link exchanges and so on, and now your readers don't even see your adverts, let alone click on them, bang goes your income. And presumably bust goes your site, unless you come with another income-generating model; say paying members only - another tactic that doesn't best please your "I want the best of all worlds and I won't pay a penny" average web user.

Currently it's probably not a big issue. Only a tiny amount of people probably know about Greasemonkey and its equivalents, and fewer yet likely bother using it. But it's something that potentially could be an issue in future. A few years back, only an elite few were using that classic of behaviour-modifiers, a popup blocker. Now pretty much all mainstream browsers come with them as standard.

So...what to do? Well, web users: if anything about the web annoys you, go get Greasemonkey. It's not as difficult as it might sound to use. Make the web what you want it to be, and share it with others. In the back of your mind, accept that in this cruel world you may have to pay one way or another for the content you like to read.

Web authors: if it bothers you ,write sites so pleasant to look at and easy to use that no-one will even want to modify them. Come up with new models of income-generation. If you shows adverts, do so responsibly and non-obtrusively. Embrace the new dynamic nature of the web. Pleasing everyone all of the time - how hard can it be?