Annoyance: Bloglines has no del.icio.us integration. This hinders my workflow as I cannot move items of interest directly from Bloglines into del.icio.us. Instead, I have to use a lot of Firefox tabs and a del.icio.us bookmarklet. Solution: Use client side DOM manipulation to replace all "Clip/blog this" links below each Bloglines entry with "Post to del.icio.us" links. Encapsulate the required Javascript and have it called automagically by a Firefox extension whenever the Bloglines site gets loaded - voila, we've got a so called Greasemonkey site customization script aka userscript.
Annoyance: Gmail sucks most where it should less, in search. Even for simple operations like "show all mails from a specific person" or "show all of today's mail" the extended search form has to be filled out. Solution: Add Persistent (or Saved) Searches to Gmail with a Greasemonkey userscript.
Annoyance: Flickr makes great use of Flash in Organizr, but its use of Flash for the simple task of displaying photos and photonotes slows things down unnecessarily. Solution: Install a Greasemonkey userscript that removes the Flash from Flickr photo pages and replaces it with DHTML that works better than the original solution. What we get is called Lickr, Flickr without the Flash.
So using the Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox plus custom scripts that run whenever a specified page gets loaded into the browser, both minor annoyances of specific web sites or web applications can be fixed and completely new features can be added to such, including some sort of persistence mechanism and the ability to pull in data from other servers with XMLHttpRequest. In other words, it not only allows to fix issues with websites but also provides an higher-level mechanism for adding custom features to web applications, all taking place on the user end alone. Now think about possible implications.
Adrian Holovaty also offers an Greasemonkey compiler that turns userscripts into standalone XPI extensions for Firefox that people can run without having to install the Greasemonkey extension itself. There is a central userscript repository that already holds a plethora of site-specific scripts, and the Greasemonkey author keeps us up to date on his Greaseblog.
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