One nifty thing that the Web Developer extension for Firefox can do is live HTML editing, on the currently loaded page. The feature is activated via the toolbar, under the Miscellaneous button, via the item “Edit HTML”. It pops up a text box containing the current page’s HTML. Edit to your heart’s content, and hit the Apply button (the blue-with-green-arrow button beside the search box – not exactly the most obvious icon for “Apply”, but that’s a UI critique for another time). The current loaded web page will reflect your changes.
Obviously it will stick around only until you load some other page, since you are not actually editing the web page on the remote server itself. So how is this useful?
So MegaShares is one of those sketchy file hosting and download sites, akin to Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc. I had a problem here where some some files are served from storage machine #21, which was apparently overloaded or just not configured right – it would start the download fine, but the download gradually stalls before completion. Wacky. There appears to be some redundancy, however, and I wondered if I can grab the file from another server by changing the machine number in the URL.
Unfortunately, as most of these places do, they prohibit direct access to a file without going through their UI, so I can’t just take the download URL, change the machine number, and pop it in the browser. I assumed they were checking referrers, so I spoofed the REFERER field. No luck.
You can see where I’m going with this. Enter the Web Developer extension. Used the Edit HTML feature to change the URL on the page directly, and clicked through the changed link. Success! Their script accepts this action, and the download starts from machine #3. Whatever referrer check or scripting magic that they use to enforce their no-direct-access policy is still intact, since the rest of the page has not changed.
Obviously this is a specific example – if there were no storage redundancy at MegaShare, this trick would have been useless. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the power of live-editing a loaded page, in your browser. Extensions like Greasemonkey is the pinnacle of this kind of editing, but for a once-off adjustment, one doesn’t really need the power of a full scripting environment like that.
Not quite a real Read/Write Web, but an interesting trick to keep in mind.