Site-specific extensions
I’ve been thinking about per-site user stylesheets for a while now, but my colleague Adrian has gone one better: his All Music Guide Corrector extension for Firefox fixes their horrible JavaScript links, hides the useless Flash navigation and improves their unpopular “read more” links, causing them to load content on the current page rather than navigating to a new page entirely.
I believe that extensions like this have a significant role to play. Bugzilla’s Tech Evangelism project is overflowing with badly designed sites that through ignorance or choice refuse to work with standards compliant browsers, many of which have available patches just waiting to be implemented. Per-site extensions at least allow users to choose to fix the problem locally and route around the damage—and their use should send a powerful message to the sites in question.
This kind of extension also introduces some interesting questions. How will site owners react to their users tweaking their websites in this way? Is it ethical to modify a site without the user’s permission to improve functionality? What about to block irritating ads?
Pop-up blockers have only scratched the surface. Let’s see some innovation.
More recent articles
- Understanding GPT tokenizers - 8th June 2023
- Weeknotes: Parquet in Datasette Lite, various talks, more LLM hacking - 4th June 2023
- It's infuriatingly hard to understand how closed models train on their input - 4th June 2023
- ChatGPT should include inline tips - 30th May 2023
- Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused - 27th May 2023
- llm, ttok and strip-tags - CLI tools for working with ChatGPT and other LLMs - 18th May 2023
- Delimiters won't save you from prompt injection - 11th May 2023
- Weeknotes: sqlite-utils 3.31, download-esm, Python in a sandbox - 10th May 2023
- Leaked Google document: "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" - 4th May 2023
- Midjourney 5.1 - 4th May 2023