Most of you have probably seen the little "Take back the web" Firefox promotional buttons at some point. Firefox is a pretty feature-rich browser by itself, but extensions like Greasemonkeyreally do put you in control of your browsing experience.

If you've never heard about Greasemonkey before, it's described as an addon that "allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript."

Once you install the extension, check out userscript.org, a massive repository of scripts that you can download and use. I've been using Greasemonkey for a long time now, and I still continue to discover really useful scripts all the time. This one, for instance, automatically backs up any text you enter into a textarea and restores it if it's lost for some reason (a great complement to session saver). Here's one that disables those annoying inline IntelliTXT ads. And here's a really cool one that automatically displays any image links using the "lightbox" effect. That's just a small sample of the many useful scripts out there.

There are similar add-ons for other browsers like IE and Safari too. Just remember that not all scripts in the userscripts.org repository will be compatible with them.

Take back the web, indeed. :)