If you think like me, you must have always considered the possibility of making changes to the things that you come by or use on daily basis. Little differences in these can make your life much better, or worse. Among the things that I always wanted to change are … Internet web sites!

Many of the websites I visit daily (Google, Hotmail, Blogger … etc) don’t look the way I want them. Sometimes I find it easier to use a page if a certain link was moved to somewhere, other times I wish I can delete some sections of the page and have only the content am interested in. Few times I did come with brilliant ideas to improve the page and wished I could contribute!

I may have sounded a bit picky, but I know all people would like to make some change. There is no single web-site layout that looks fine to all people, simply because people have different thoughts and tastes.

So is there any way you can make changes to Internet web sites that you don’t own? The answer is No …

Instead, you can change “the way they look to you”, which is as much better! This can be done using a couple of FireFox extensions …

1. Greasemonkey (Web Site – Download Link)

This is a famous extension for FireFox that modifies web pages according to special scripts. People have been using Greasemonkey to alter web pages in so many different ways. Greasemonkey scripts modify the internal HTML source of Internet pages once they are loaded, and are thus able to make wide changes to the page elements, their behavior, the page layout, and the functioning of the page!

Greasemonkey is cool, but creating a Greasemonkey script is a hard task for the average user. People usually search the Internet for scripts, but only few are capable of creating them … so here comes the other part of the magic …

2. The Platypus extension (Web Site – Download Link)

This extension will add a toolbar of editing tools that will let you modify the loaded Internet page in real time, just as easily as you modify a word document. When you’re done making changes to the page, Platypus will generate a Greasemonkey script that will re-render this Internet page the exact way you designed it every time it is loaded!

The possibilities of what you can be done with these two extensions are endless. I’ve already started creating “cleaning” scripts to simplify and remove all the ads from my favorite web sites. Below is a new Hotmail layout I designed, next to the old layout.