Personalized browser as the window to YOUR Internet

Everyone uses a browser and they see it as the window to the Internet (obviously). But in reality the real window to the Internet is our personalized browser, not the vanilla browser we get when we first install it.

This trend is very clear when looking at a browser used by any prosumer. The user-interface is full of toolbar additions for services, the theme has been changed, there are extensions of various meaning adding gesture controls for example. The personalization has gone long past just having bookmarks.

A great example of this I had not picked up that strongly before are user-scripts. These small tweaks that can be installed on Firefox through Greasemonkey have the ability to remember information, remove parts of pages, change the look of pages, automatically mash-up information from sources, cross-refence data, and even speed up common task so that they require less clicks. User-scripts simply allow you to optimize your Internet experience.

A simple example would be to install a script that always automatically logs you into a service when you access their website and turns on your presence message to something new. This is fairly easy to create in JS.

Already now the availability of user-scripts is wide, with over 7500 scripts at userScripts.org mostly addressing the most used sites and services of the web. For Flickr one simple search finds over 100 results.

Of course to evolve user-scripts to more mundane users would either need massive volumes (developers are working on it) or a tool for simple creation. The basics of what scripts do are anyways fairly simple, as listed earlier, so a similar application as the Automator for Leopard Mac OS X could be an interesting concept.

Browsing is getting more personal and the people working around browsers whether for desktops or mobile devices need to adapt their approach to fulfill these needs. You want your window to your Internet behaving like you and not as someone designed it.