View web pages the way you want to with Customize Your Web
No CSS? No problem!
The rather-too-literally named Customize Your Web program lets you change key features of any website with only a few clicks. A free add-on for Firefox, CYW allows anyone to move page elements around, hide them, or paste them elsewhere on the site. Adding keyboard shortcuts is a piece of cake too, and best of all you don’t have to write a single line of code to achieve results. Developer Rudolf Noe describes his software as “Greasemonkey for non-developers.”
CYW is one of the best applications we’ve seen for a long time; if allowing any user to edit their browsing experience regardless of their technical know-how isn’t Web 2.0 in action, we don’t know what is. Even something as simple as setting ‘login’ buttons to click themselves will save us thousands of keystrokes every year, and we’re looking forward to trying out some of the deeper uses that are outlined in this video:
Hmmm, while I think a few aspects of this are a good idea – like the auto log-in button, I do think we need to be wary of the greater amount of control this could give everyone – for example, you have adverts within your pages, as do all of the main players in social networking, but if they could all be simply and very easily removed or hidden by all users, what happens then? – the simple answer is that advertising space would no longer be a viable way to pay for the sites to continue running as they are, so the running costs will inevitably end up being passed onto the users in membership fees, which would be the death of several of these sites.
Plus, as a web designer, it has to be noted that I am not keen on the idea that my hard work carefully placing various elements to their best effect, can simply be undone by them being removed, altered, or moved around at the whim of any visitor to the site.