July 19, 2004, 10:10 PM ET
Site-specific browser extension: All Music Guide
Lots of people are talking about All Music Guide's for-the-worse redesign. Here's an initial attempt at fixing it -- routing around the damage, so to speak.
I've written an extension for Mozilla Firefox that, when installed, alters the display and functionality of allmusic.com. Specifically, it does the following:
- It cleans up the horrible JavaScript-only links sitewide, thus enabling 21st-century browsing techniques such as tabbed browsing and opening links in new windows.
- It hides the annoying Flash spinner thing atop each page.
- It changes the functionality of the "Read more..." links on band and album detail pages. On the old AMG, band and album pages contained full reviews. Now, they feature only the first few sentences, with a link to "Read more..." on a separate page. The extension changes the functionality of that "Read more..." link so that, instead of taking you to a new page, clicking the link will dynamically load the full band/album review and insert it inline.
(If you have any ideas about what else the extension could do, please post a comment here or contact me. One idea I've had since I wrote it yesterday is to expand the length of the "Song title" table cell on album pages.)
To install the extension, just click the following link while using Mozilla Firefox 0.9+. It might work in 0.8, but I haven't tested it.
Then, restart your browser, and you're all set. Pretty easy, eh? You can uninstall it later in Firefox's handy extension manager.
A few tiny bugs exist -- namely that the extension makes the allmusic.com home-page link colors a bit funky -- but it's intended as a proof-of-concept more than anything else. To my knowledge, using browser extensions to "fix" Web sites, or add extra functionality, is unexplored territory.
There's a huge potential here. Site-specific Firefox extensions are an elegant, one-click-install solution to the problem of, well, lousy Web interfaces -- a problem Web users have had to shut up and deal with for as long as the Web has been around.
Let's do more of these things.
UPDATE, Oct. 15 -- I've updated the extension to work with Firefox Version 1.0 Preview Release. Thanks to everybody for the continued comments.
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