In 2004, the website All Music Guide did a horrible redesign. I was so irritated that I created a Firefox extension that did only one thing — it made All Music Guide a bit more useable.
To my knowledge, this was the first "site-specific" browser extension, so I wrote a blog post about it:
Aaron Boodman saw my post and decided to generalize the idea; he created Greasemonkey, which was a single browser extension that could aggregate site-specific JS customizations. In the years since, this idea of "user scripts" has further developed, and I think some browsers even support the concept natively.
Ah, that reminds me of how I modified sites using https://www.proxomitron.info/ , it's a Windows program that would start a local HTTP proxy and you can configure browsers to use this proxy, and it would block ads. This worked really well before the web became HTTPS-crazy.
The way it would block ads is to analyze the files it was fetching for the browser and modifying found keywords, for a crude example all IMG tags with SRC containing the string ad.* would be replaced by gray images.
I also remember using it to "fix" a redesign of a site.
In that case, thank you to you both for dramatically improving my web experience -- I don't know that I could stand browsing without uBlockOrigin and ViolentMonkey
I'm not aware of any browsers that support it natively, although TBH there are so many random Firefox forks that any one of them could have just bundled the extension and called it native
I'm pretty sure AllMusic was my source of track lengths for albums. Back in the middle of high school (so just before that redesign maybe?), I had some java utility that (I'm sure I'm imperfectly recalling) I pasted track information into. It then generated the Wikipedia markup equivalent, and I went around editing album pages on Wikipedia adding track lengths (and total album length).
And that's why I have something over 1000 wikipedia edits made a long time ago.
To my knowledge, this was the first "site-specific" browser extension, so I wrote a blog post about it:
https://www.holovaty.com/writing/all-music-guide/
Aaron Boodman saw my post and decided to generalize the idea; he created Greasemonkey, which was a single browser extension that could aggregate site-specific JS customizations. In the years since, this idea of "user scripts" has further developed, and I think some browsers even support the concept natively.