This brought back some memories. In July 2004, I made a Firefox extension to "fix" a bad redesign of the website All Music Guide (my blog post: <a href="http://www.holovaty.com/writing/all-music-guide/" rel="nofollow">http://www.holovaty.com/writing/all-music-guide/</a>). To my knowledge this was the first instance of a site-specific browser extension.<p>Aaron Boodman saw that idea and took it much farther by developing Greasemonkey, which made the idea more general and more powerful.
No mention of Binary Behaviors (<a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2001/january/cutting-edge-binary-behaviors-in-internet-explorer-5-5" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2001/...</a>), but I guess these could go in the ActiveX bucket. They are a bit more interesting than plug-ins when you consider where some of the current innovation is happening with front end web development and standards.
> <i>One notable startup I’ve come across is Insight Browser, an iOS browser that allows users to build and share simple extensions.</i><p>I've worked with the Insight [1] folks (YC W19, I think?) to port my Chrome extension [2] to their platform. They made it super easy, and I'd recommend others give them a try. Not every extension makes sense on iOS, but for those that do, this can be a slick way to finally reach iOS users.<p>Hopefully Insight can popularize mobile extensions and generate some competition in the mobile browser space!<p>1: <a href="https://www.insightbrowser.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.insightbrowser.com</a><p>2: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifjafammaookpiajfbedmacfldaiamgg?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...</a>
Author of the blog post here! If you comment with corrections/milestones I missed, I'll try to incorporate them<p>I'll also be attempting to update the augmented browsing/browser extension Wikipedia page in the coming weeks
Disappointed but not surprised that Chimera (the original one) wasn't mentioned: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110725164212/http://www.chimera.org/one/overview.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20110725164212/http://www.chimer...</a>