A recent New York Times article about addictive games like Angry Birds had a really clever and engaging feature: a video game! This sort of thing is just a fun way to play with the net. The game was actually created by a 17-year old to impress a girl he liked. In the original version, you installed the game by dragging a button to your bookmarks bar, letting you destroy any page that you’re browsing. You can also click the button multiple times and get multiple shooters.

Katamari Hack is a similar game in which a giant ball plows across the website page and destroys everything in its path.

I’ve never written one myself, but these are fun examples of powerful things you can do with the browser as an operating system. Firefox’s Greasemonkey community is still massive.

ActiveInbox, another browser add-on, is something I use everyday for managing my Gmail account on the web. It expands the functionality of web version of Gmail without ever engaging the Gmail developers. Of course, as a user I have to understand that the plug-in is not the product, so if something breaks I need to be informed enough to report the bug to Google or to ActiveInbox.

Tags: ActiveInbox, Browser Script, Katamari, new york times, Video Game