Taking back the Web

The original commercial Web browsers seemed more oriented toward pleasing Web page creators than their consumers. The author found the ability of scripts to take over browser processing, generate a desktop full of pop-up windows, and execute arbitrary code on my machine offensive. A Web page´s source is clearly no deep secret, after all, it´s revealed by a few lines of Java. The author suspected a dark conspiracy between Microsoft and the page-creation establishment, but that limitation turned out to be a bug, provoked, among other things, by having an alias to the text viewer on the desktop. The Greasemonkey Firefox extension could change the way people view Web pages. It lets users load and execute JavaScripts on Web pages, allowing them to manipulate the pages content in certain ways. We have seen a continuing arms race between malware writers and detectors and between Web page creators and search engine writers. If this technology moves beyond high-tech early adopters to actually impact the way the Web is used, we should expect a similar continuing escalation of more clever Web page hacks and more cleverly generated Web pages.