From the Gmail Greasemonkey 1.0 API page, emphasis added:
Greasemonkey is an integral part of the web experience for many experienced users. Google acknowledges that some people are going to change their own experience of our web applications regardless of what we do. Resistance, as they say, is futile. It would also be somewhat hypocritical. After all, a Google employee wrote Greasemonkey in the first place, another wrote these scripts to add functionality to Gmail, and a third wrote two books on the subject (and these docs).
The news about Gmail and Greasemonkey is cool and interesting, but what I found most interesting was the emphasized statement above.
When I wrote a week or two ago that I didn’t think an Ad-driven business model could last forever, I think a lot of people probably thought that was crazy. After all, don’t we read articles about blogs, sites, and businesses making hundreds of thousands of dollars, per month, with online advertising?
Absolutely; and I think those sites and business models will continue to work. Probably they’ll even do so for the next few years, even the next decade (maybe). But Google’s acknowledgment above is at the heart of what I was trying to say:
We, the web publisher, have NO CONTROL over how the browser views our site.
It’s conceivable that anyone, via their browser, plugins like Greasemonkey, other addons, or yet other technologies and methods unforeseen, can ignore or over-ride our CSS, our carefully tested layouts, any and all widgets on the page, anything.
Yes, right now it’s a very small percentage of rather geeky folks who are using Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey, etc, to do this, but we have no reason to suppose that it will remain this esoteric in the future. It could become easy as one-click, in many more browsers, to remove ads from web pages. What then?
Again, the sky is not falling, no one is going to stop making money, and this business model isn’t going to fall apart overnight. I’m just not sure it’s The One True Business Model that will continue to work in perpetuity…
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Back to Gmail & Greasemonkey. Again, this is cool. Anyone found or created greasemonkey scripts for this yet?
