Hacking the Web with Greasemonkey 512
plasticmillion writes "Greasemonkey is a revolutionary Firefox extension that many feel has enormous implications for the future evolution of the web. By making it easy to write client-side scripts that modify webpages as you surf, it shifts the balance of power from content creators to content consumers. Since its inception, it has given rise to an impressive array of scripts for everything from enhancing Gmail with one-click delete functionality to preventing Hotmail from spawning new windows when you click on external links. In recent Greasemonkey news, Mark Pilgrim just published a comprehensive primer called 'Dive Into Greasemonkey', a must-read for those who want to try their hand at writing their own scripts. It should be noted that Greasemonkey is not without controversy, but this has done nothing to reduce its popularity among web programmers. Even Opera has jumped on the bandwagon with their own version of user scripts. To illustrate the principle to /.ers, I whipped up a handy little script called 'Slashdot Live Comment Tree', which lets you expand and collapse entire threads in an article's comments."
Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has tried something similar before with their toolbar and ISBNs.
That said, I am going to use this guide to disable Greasemonkey [edwards.name]. I write websites so I can present ideas to people. I don't want them to see my site the way they want to see it. I want them to see it the way it was meant to be seen. That way I can provide content based on expectations of standards compliance.
If you want to display my content with your own formatting, use my RSS feed [scottleonard.ca].
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Funny)
Sieg heil!
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Funny)
I've been slightly nervous of the Welsh ever since..
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Funny)
Step 1. Slashdot my own site.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Insightful)
So you are in full support of the MPAA and the RIAA who want to have full control over their content and only allow people to access it, and use it they way they want you to use it?
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of it this way. Many musicians don't have a problem when people do remixes of their stuff, some do. That's why the majority of those that do offer special deals (or lisensing
Those that do not, don't offer such. Though it's still possible to do so,
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
What I do with those works in the privacy of my own home is my business. I might just prefer it that way, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Artists do have recourse against people redistributing altered ("raped") works, but that is also limited.
In the case of greasemonkey, it's just a tool you use to view the web; other people might use other tools, like lynx for example, which renders a page completely differently from firefox or internet explorer. It's personal use. So lay off of it.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2)
Though to be fair, rms was talking about useful knowledge like computer software or scientific discoveries, not artworks like music or a web page.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
You can suggest, tell the visitor 'look, this is supposed to look like that', but ultimately the choice is the user's, just as in a book the reading order is merely a hint, if one wants to read the book backwards more power to him, and the author is not supposed to come at him with a big stick saying "no no, you're not supposed to read backwards, you can't skip pages either or i'll beat you to a bloody pulp you crackwhore", which is exactly what mfh intends to do...
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
You can suggest, tell the visitor 'look, this is supposed to look like that', but ultimately the choice is the user's,
yes it is (the user's choice).. hasn't user-defined colors (or stylesheets in newer versions) been in graphical web browsers since pretty much the beginning?
note to webmasters: if you DONT want people to alter your page on the client-side, code it strict, use css, and leave the annoying scripts, ads, popups, ani gifs and other crap out of it.
once a site is on MY computer, i will do with it as i please. so long as i dont republish it, you can't piss and moan about it.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Insightful)
That would help customizing, but a well served well designed streamlined well thought (features wise) website will have much less chances to get "client-hacked". The intention here (I hope) was to explain that a "perfect website" would lead the users to NOT customize it because it'd already fit their needs, which is the perfect opposition of the fully customization-disabling flash website.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
On top of that The primary goal of a website is not to convey "art", it's to convey and publish information...
And as I (and other people) said, if I can't change the font colors, reorganize the page or whatever I want, how pissed the so called artist will be when I'll start using Links or Lynx to browse his website? or Netscape 2?
Fact is, if you want your website to be set in stone and consider it a crime for anyone to modify what he sees on his computer without any impact on whatever the other may be fed you shouldn't be creating a website in the first place.
You should be hacking rocks (even though sculptures can be broken or re-sculpted, you don't own them anymore as soon as they leave you) or painting (see above).
The feelings/emotions are supposed to be conveyed to the reader. If the reader doesn't understand/want them, what are you going to do, try to force your own sensibility on him? Nice way to make him leave forever...
art/artist (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Informative)
He even provides an XML feed for you to format to your hearts content.
Yeah, big supporter of the MPAA/RIAA there!
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
But they're not displaying their content. The client web browsers are displaying the content and they have a right to display however they please. :)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as you do it in a standards compliant way, then isn't it a bit presumptious to decide how I decide to digest the information.
If I want to use Lynx to view your page, I will, if I want to apply my own java transforms on it I will.
Hell, if I want to print it out and use it as toilet paper, I will.
You seem to have the wrong way of thinking about this web lark.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Funny)
Don't use an inkjet printer to do this. The sweat on the cheeks will cause the ink from the goatse.cx links to stain the skin and you'll become a walking advertisement at the next sun club event.
Crap (Score:5, Funny)
Now that you've said this, everyone is going to use my site as TP. Thanks, buddy.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Funny)
Talk about taking the web back. Sheesh.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
But the web is about sending content to the user - it's up to the user how they want to display it. Unles you're supplying a locked down PC with your own browser configuration you have absolutely no control over what the end user does with the content you send, or how they interpret it.
Sure you can send CSS to the broser, but your visitor using links isn't going to see the result of you work. The visitor using a screen reader or mobile phone will be equally ignorant of your efforts.
These are user installed scripts, and this is the web not television. The folk visiting sites are not their passively, they're there to interact and if they want your site to function a little differently so it better fits with their expectations what rights do you have to stop them?
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2, Insightful)
This doesn't make any sense. How is the user capable, or how has the user been capable to display information on the Web (not the internet, just a part) with a web browser.
Remember, this like this never happened before this FF extension, so where do you come off saying that?
People write web pages, the browser displays them. Similar to the television, yet far more versatile, it simply displays a site how the designer attended. How has this been difficult to unde
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Interesting)
Bollocks. You could write bookmarklets, or user CSS files. Hell, you could disable CSS or Javascript, you could use a browser that displays things a certain way. You could write your own browser. You could use man-in-the-middle programs to rewrite code before it reaches the browser.
The web is about information. The presentation of that information is ultimately up to the user.
Having said all that, I should point out that I am somewhat uncomfortable with the blind adoption Greasemonkey is seeing. A lot of web sites use Javascript that makes assumptions about the structure of the page. By changing the structure of the page, you're going to potentially break pages that dynamically change themselves.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Informative)
Fine. But script developers are going to see this, realise that their script doesn't work and either (1) fix it, or (2) abandon the idea. If the problems are more subtle, then the user's going to know they installed a script that's changing the page, and are going to try disabling it first to see if that fixes the problem...
This is a power user feature, not something your average newbie is
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course he's within his rights. The real question is what's the benefit to him? People using greasemonkey tend to be people who know what they're doing, so if they break something on a site they'll likely be able to fix it. But just like the article, there seems to be this paranoia that greasmonkey will run rampant and ruin everyone's browsing experience.
Bah! When I go to the poster's website, you know what I see? Overlapping content because I don't run a 1024x768 window. I could fix it with greasemonkey, but that would be 'breaking' the designer's intentions.
I'm a web designer, and I truly believe that a good designer knows better than a user how things should look 95% of the time... but if a user wants to override my design choices that is fine with me. Of course my sites may end up looking up broken and discombobulated, but why should that matter to me? Anyone doing that should know why things are broken, and if not than it's not really worth my time to worry about it. I'd rather have a few idiots think I'm a shitty designer than have my fellow web hackers think I'm a control freak.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:4, Insightful)
> than a user how things should look 95% of the time...
Yeah, maybe, but the *other* 97.384% of web designers *don't*. For starters, most of them are stuck in a brain-dammaged 1985-esque mindset wherein they pretend they're still working with an ink-on-paper medium. I've given up entirely on the idea of allowing websites to choose their own colors, and I've half a mind to take away their ability to choose their own layouts too, because most webmasters can't design a layout that works at different resolutions and with different text sizes if their lives depend on it.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sorry, but where's the evidence? I know tons of people who switched to Firefox, but not a single layperson installing extensions or user stylesheets. I've fielded hundreds if not thousands of com
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Informative)
It's not something everyone has to get all up in arms about. It's a presentation of information. If you don't like it, go somewhere else! If he chooses to display it and prevent this extension from running on his site, so be it! He's well within his rights to do such.
I suppose from the above statements that you're opposed to the level of control most browsers ALREADY give over the display of content? To wit, in Firefox I can go to Edit->Preferences->General, and in there override fonts and colors so that the page's fonts, font sizes, and colors aren't used. I can choose to force links to be displayed with underlines. Under Edit->Preferences->Web Features, I can override popups, javascript, image loading, etc, as well as provide exceptions to most of those... Under Edit->Preferences->Advanced, I can control the resizing of images, force links to open in new tabs, etc. Additionally, if I set up proxies, I can force all my connections to go through privoxy, blocking ads and the like. I can also choose to not install flash, making websites that use it extensively stand out pretty sorely.
All of these settings can be viewed as a bastardization of designers' attempts to display information in a certain way. And most of these settings have been around since the early 1.x days of Netscape Navigator. GreaseMonkey appears to be the logical extension of these settings to the CSS world.
All the HTML markup in the world serves a single purpose---to suggest how a browser should display something to approximate what the originator had in mind. Nothing has ever said that HTML is an imperative command to display something ONLY one way.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been doing stuff like this with proxomitron [proxomitron.info] for years. There are other tools that can do the same. If you did not know about them then you probably did not bother to look.
But surely you do know that almost all browsers at least let the user change default colors and fonts.
One thing I did with proxomitron was changing slashdot's color cheme to bright text on dark background for a while.
other things were disabling animated gifs, turning flash animations into links, and so on.
It is my browser, and I decide how it displays stuff.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong and wronger. The *whole point* of the WWW is that a document is presented with a documented set of tags, and it's up to the user agent to specify how those tags get interpreted. The first browser I used (Chameleon, ~1995) had a panel for setting prefs on how you wanted to interpret tags. If you
NOT a derived art... (Score:5, Insightful)
Using Greasemonkey or ANY OTHER WEB CLIENT other than the one(s) the author is targetting does not make this a derived art. The original is still in its badly conceived format.
The problem here is that a large number of web "developers" believe that they can control the user's experience. The reality is that this is completely contrary to the HTML standard.
HTML is a method for giving structure to a document. CSS is a method of suggesting look-and-feel of the document. However, NOTHING prevents me from using an arbitrary web client (note: a "browser" is just one type of web client) that will display the structured document in some other way.
If you are designing a page/site in such a way that you try to force a given look-and-feel to everyone, you are limiting the usefulness of your site...not improving it.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2)
Hopefully, Greasemonkey will advance the ball, without becoming the biggest virus vector since <cheap shot goes here>.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2)
Tell me, do you have Designed for IE6 in the corner of your site as well?
The age of web designers thinking they can control how a site looks down to the pixel is over, dude. How do you stop your visitors from using Lynx or braille or audio readers, because they don't show the site "the way it was meant to be seen".
What a complete load of absolute bollocks. HTML is a markup language: learn this and you will do well. Try to use it otherwise and you will get left behind (like Slashdot, with its creaking n
What do you mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
That'll teach them young whipper-snappers!
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:4, Insightful)
And how is that? Because HTML was a protocol for transferring information, not for regidly defined formatting or layout. The graphical browsers came along and people started taking the attitude you are espousing "as it was meant to be seen" by you, the creator.
HTML itself however does not support that idea. Different agents (trad. browser, voice agents for the blind etc.), different and also overriding CSS stylessheet et. al. are explicitly catared for in its idea. If the user which to use your content in a manner other than that which you suggested, the intent of the spec is on their side here. HTML is not a fixed layout format. It is for the transmission of information, to be used according to the whims of the receiver.
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Informative)
That's why GreaseMonkey exists. It allows firefox to do the work your eyes and hands must otherwise do - it gets you the information you're after, not what the designer fancies.
(I actually like your site design, and I think it is great you are releasing your work under the GPL and your content under a CC license)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2, Informative)
Thank you!
I am getting killed by my comment about Greasemonkey, but I have to put it plainly to everyone:
I provide my content with a Creative Commons license. Everyone is free to modify it. Everyone is free to use the code that generated the website (well soon enough, it's just about ready to be released) and everyone can use my RSS to reformat my site and syndicat
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
Your content is not displayed on your site, it is displayed on my computer, and you don't know my local parameters. What is there to gain, for anyone, by not allowing me to adjust for a mismatch there?
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Informative)
Subsequently, the site looks very odd and appears to have rendering problems (missing navigation links, etc).
I can sympathize totally with the desire for the site to look the way you designed it...I've spent hours and hours and hours doing this on the sites I work on, trying to make sure th
Re:Screenshot? (Score:3, Interesting)
see http://jayloden.com/scottleonard.png [jayloden.com] for a screenshot of what you'd get in a text based browser.
This is the problem with jscript DHTML menus, they're no good if you intend compatibility with accessibility standards or text browsing.
-Jay
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel the (Firefox) user should, and generally is going to have the edge, what with the uriid extension to apply site-specific CSS, greasemonkey, and other tools. But page producers always have wanted to dictate exactly how their pages appear to the user, however misguided that is, and I doubt the battle will ever be over.
Google Cache (Score:2)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:5, Informative)
Greasemonkey is nothing but "the easy way", but client side modification of a website has been live for years:
Don't want that? don't create websites. Your websites are not here for you and if they are they shouldn't be online, websites are for the visitor and he can do whatever he wants with the data he receives (including sending the whole content of your website to
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2)
> I don't want them to see my site the way they want to see it.
> I want them to see it the way it was meant to be seen.
Which is it? You write websites to present ideas or eyecandy?
Unless you've ebayed your low UID from a true old timer, you should've been around long enough to know that the idea of imposing a set format for your website goes against what the web was originally made for.
People have a funny way of taking what you meant and twist
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Pfeh. (Score:3, Insightful)
What's next---are you going to tell people they can't visit your site using lynx, or with images turned off, or that they can't change their font size, so they'll have to squint like everyone else?
What's the point of making it harder on yo
There is a well-hidden point in here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disable Greasemonkey (Score:3, Informative)
The author controls what the site looks like by default, but the user may want to set the font size, the
MOD PARENT UP!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
You are absolutely correct. A web browser is a tool for displaying data from an unknown - and therefore untrusted - source, namely the Web. It should never freeze, crash or overflow, no matter what garbage is fed to it.
If Firefox indeed does crash when attempting to view this web page, then this issue needs to be fixed immediately, since not fixing it makes Firefox u
Paid articles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:um which one? (Score:3, Informative)
This one. [forrester.com] In the slashot story it is the link on the word "controversy".
There's a one paragraph blurb claiming "But IT managers beware: Greasemonkey will cause you nothing but headaches, and may even be a good reason to delay that Firefox pilot you're planning", but giving absolutely no reason. If you look on the right it says:
Buy this research
Price: US$49.00
Report Length: 3 pages
I really don't think Slashdot should bother linking to a page with absolutely NO informa
"Not without controversy" (Score:5, Insightful)
It should also be noted that the person claiming controvesy is also charging $49.00 for the "research" he has written. Do people buy these things?
Any, the summary of it reads as basically "users might install extensions that don't work with your own corporate pages". Personally, if an end user is installing applications without understanding the implications, you should ask whether that user should be allowed to install applications. The "researcher" claims that this risk should delay Firefox roll-outs in the enterprise.
Re:"Not without controversy" (Score:5, Insightful)
You wouldn't deploy IE without locking it down so why not firefox?
We have a deployment of about 2000 workstations with a highly customized build of firefox out there. I say customized but what I mean is that it's had various GUI elements stripped, keyboard shortcuts stripped and implements locked preferences. One of those preferences is software install. The only site that can install software is our internal update site.
Somebody paid him to write this, possibly as part of an internal migration plan but he failed to notice that in a corporate environment, a well thought-out mozilla implementation would implement things like locked preferences and other customization. Combine this with workstation security and his point is probably moot. I'm not going to spend 50 bucks to find out.
Re:"Not without controversy" (Score:2)
Re:"Not without controversy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if a small fraction of people actually buy things that are advertised by spam, then maybe a small fraction of people are willing to pay $49 for a web article.
I have to admit that I'm tempted to throw up a site with a couple essays just to see if anybody would actually pay me $49 to read them.
Let's use this to our advantage (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let's use this to our advantage (Score:2)
Re:Let's use this to our advantage (Score:2)
My question still stands. Who's going to write the script.
Re:Let's use this to our advantage (Score:5, Informative)
already been done [daishar.com]
see how much people dislike that geeza ? if this was a pub he would of been slapped up and kicked out a long time ago
Re:Let's use this to our advantage (Score:2, Funny)
It is invaluable. (Score:5, Interesting)
It was difficult. Took me two months of working with greasemonkey, of 3 minutes stolen here, and 5 minutes borrowed there in between calls (did I mention I'm only a phone monkey for a DSL ISP?). But in the end, not only can I use our main webapp in Firefox, it has features that the standard one doesn't. It often helps to shave up to a minute off of calltimes.
Which may be why I'm in trouble for using Firefox at that job. Dunno.
Were you trying to be ridiculously jerky?? (Score:5, Insightful)
The second worst thing about that statement is that you sound as if you mean it.
The worst thing is that you sound as if you're proud of it.
This attitude causes most of the suffering and evil in the world. The relatively few people who actually have the goal of harming others wouldn't get very far without lots of wimps with this attitude.
(I may just be troll feeding here, but I still had to call it.)
Excellent Idea, but breaks Websites (Score:2, Interesting)
While I like the features of Greasemonkey lot, I had to uninstall it because it is incompatible with some websites I use often. They jut plain don't work with Greasemonkey enabled.
Example: map.search.ch/etoy [search.ch] (The map does not display at all)
I've submitted a bug about it, but my submission has been completely ignored (as mozdev.org is slashdotted right now I don't have the reference handy).
Markus
Re:Excellent Idea, but breaks Websites (Score:4, Informative)
Or at least set them so they don't execute on that particular site...
Re:Excellent Idea, but breaks Websites (Score:3, Informative)
It looks like this was a partial example of the problem sitting between chair and screen.
The particlar site is using iframes and GreaseMonkey summarily hides those tags in its default configuration. Excluding the site manually brings it back to life.
However, this means GreaseMonkey becomes thus a Geek-only tool. I can not ask of my mother or wife to know about such problems and manually configure exceptions if things don't work.
Markus
Choice quote from 'Dive Into Greasemonkey' (Score:5, Funny)
Could be useful for Slashdot then
Re:Choice quote from 'Dive Into Greasemonkey' (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I'm sure pleased with the Slashdot Recolour [mkgray.com] script...
Michael
I'm worried that greasemonkey has security flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite how useful it is, I have some concern with GreaseMonkey and your browsers security.
The basic problem I see is that user scripts are plug-ins to to a plug-in. User scripts could do things that would be bad for security such as:
GreaseMonkey does not use the white list of sites allowed to install plugins and allows user scripts to be installed from just about anywhere.
I'm worried that somebody could set up a repository of user scripts that appear to do useful things but have spyware embedded in them. Users would install GreaseMonkey user scripts from the site thinking they were getting useful functionality but not realizing they were getting additional "goodies".
I don't install user scripts without knowing how they work and looking over the source myself. Preferably, I write my own. I don't see most users being able to do that sort of analysis. Hence the danger.
--Currency Calculator to Calculate Rates of Exchange for Foreign Currencies [ostermiller.org]
Re:I'm worried that greasemonkey has security flaw (Score:5, Informative)
No, they aren't. They are inserted into the code of another site's pages, therefore they get local access priveleges over those pages.
I'm a dev on GM, and I'd like to shed some light.
First, yes, GM is in the same security sandbox as the page script. It does not run as local script.
The threat model of a user script is the very same as a bookmarklet, except that user scripts get injected without clicks, meaning that the user could forget about some installed script.
If someone installs an Evil(tm) script, it can run on pages that the evil person doesn't control, and provide data back to the evil person.
Note that such evil can be delivered in other ways (bookmarklets, toolbars, etc) which are trojans. You should consider every user script as a possible trojan. So yeah, don't install scripts that do evil things, and if you're not sure, don't install.
We're working on a community-policed user script directory which can confer some level of trust. It's not ready yet. We were slashdotted a little too early.
Also, Greasemonkey supplies some interesting functions to the user script context, including GM_xmlhttpRequest, which allows cross-domain page requests. Couple this with GM_setValue and GM_getValue, and a user script can indeed very effectively share data between different web apps. Before you wail in terror, note that information could be sent to evil third-party domain already by using scripted image tags, iframes, and form posts. GM only opens up an easier way to share data; it does not allow anything that's truly new in this respect.
content debate (Score:5, Insightful)
I would not be suprised if this debate grew bigger as the popularity of client side controll apps gets bigger.
Alot of people want their webpage to look the way they intended it to look, but I think the truth is that you can not count on that. Different browsers, different computers, different monitors...
I am in favor of client side tools, I think that a user getting the best use possible out of a site is a good thing, in fact that is my goal when designing a website. If they think they can do it better, be my guest.
Re:content debate (Score:5, Funny)
Re:content debate (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll point out, though, that such things tend to really piss me off.
Re:content debate (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why the Flash infestation is bad. It's why WWW content control is bad. It's why PDF instead of HTML is bad. It takes away output control from the user. It takes away the whole point of these markup languages.
Safari (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Safari (Score:3, Insightful)
Preventing all new-window creation in Firefox. (Score:2)
Thus all those hotmail and gmail open link in new window pains will just go away!
Greasemonkey is still in its infancy (Score:5, Interesting)
One very interesting thread has been misuse of Greasemonkey(GM). GM allow script authors to use an XML_HTTPrequest() type functionality. This is often to look up information services, such as google, de.li.ci.ous, weather etc.
With a poorly coded script, there could be thousands of http connections spawned per page transition. A DDOS of sorts. This will be an interesting one to tackle.
Any ideas out there??
Re:Greasemonkey is still in its infancy (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm thinking that either of these would cause the author to blame Firefox or GreaseMonkey for being 'slow'. If someone is clueless enough to not understand the technology, it's likely that they'd be so clueless as to blame Firefox (or possible GreaseMonkey) for any problems they encounter.
I'm thinking it would be better to throw up an error message (explaining what's going on, and providing a link to a page explaining why it'
Greasemonkey needs to inject scripts sooner (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a web page that runs a little javascript at the end, where it pops up an alert window, then redirects to another page. I would like to write a greasemonkey script to remove this redirection. Unfortunately, the page's javascript gets run before greasemonkeys. Any ideas about how get my greasemonkey script to run sooner?
Re:Greasemonkey needs to inject scripts sooner (Score:4, Informative)
But the problem I have with proxomitron is that it's a bunch of regexp matches instead of a scripting language. I've yet to figure out how to get a regexp match that spans more than one line as well. But yes, proxo works well for my particular complaint about greasemonkey.
Dangers of Greasemonkey (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dangers of Greasemonkey (Score:3, Interesting)
On to the topic, I have to say that I agree with the potential for problems. However, I have to wonder if Greasemonkey is perhaps "complex" enough that only a true geek would be interested in playing around with it. There aren't many computer geeks that I know of that are going to just go around installing every script they find without first reading nearly every line of the source code. We're geeks and we like to see how t
password power? (Score:5, Interesting)
Opera and user scripts (Score:5, Insightful)
Platypus (Score:5, Informative)
"One of the most jaw dropping extensions that I have seen to date." --Anders Conbere
Check it out.
-- Scott Turner
Re:Platypus (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing I REALLY like it for is printing pages that typically contain a ton of crap. Just invoke Platypus, highlight the containing section you want to print, press the "i" key, and voila! all surrounding content is removed! Click print, and you get a nice clean page of content. Talk about printer-friendly!
Want to see the original? Just hit refresh and everything's back to normal.
Infinite developer headache (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're writing server-side scripting, you should already be paranoid-checking for bad user submissions. Time to double-check everything is in place.
If you're writing client-side scripts, welcome to hell. You can no longer assume anything will be where you put it, or, in fact, still exist.
What's more, you can't test your site "with greasemonkey" to see if it's OK. You have no idea what the user is going to do to your page with it.
This leaves a handful of options:
1) Make your scripts disable Greasemonkey (which will work until too many sites do it, and it's updated to allow users the final say)
2) Switch productive time fixing bugs and adding features to adding and subsequently wading through checks on every possible error condition that user scripts might make possible.
3) Ignore Greasemonkey and when the users complain your site is broken, inform them it's their own stupid fault.
My personal leaning is towards (3).
Greasemonkey Is Not Without Controversy (Score:3, Interesting)
I won't pay $49 to find out what the controversy is all about, but Greasemonkey sounds good enough to download and try out.
MBTA extension for Google Maps (Score:5, Informative)
Dev. website:r .js [mojodna.net]
http://mojodna.net/2005/04/19/mbta-maps/ [mojodna.net]
Direct link to the Greasemonkey script:
http://maps.mojodna.net/mbta/mbta_google_maps.use
this is why... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:this is why... (Score:4, Informative)
I Love the Sound of Breaking Business Models (Score:5, Interesting)
The costly security report is just a money-making troll but there is one issue raised by greasemonkey that may worry a lot of content providers.
Blocking adverts is old hat but greasemonkey lets you do so much more. It offers you the potential to inject links to products from a rival vendor when browsing an online store or rewrite affiliate link ids on a page, to give two examples.
This is going to break a few business models.
Personally I'm not going to shed any tears. Many businesses have completely misunderstood the nature of the web and just seen hyperspace as somewhere else to stick up billboards. Those that can't evolve will die. But when you consider how upset certain people get if you want to just view their site in a manner they hadn't planned on, then we can definitely expect fireworks in the near future.
There's a very heated discussion between Cory Doctorow and Robert Scoble that touches on these issues at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail438.htm l [itconversations.com] about these issues, albeit in the context of Google's Autolink rather than greasemonkey.
Re:Does it something like Bookmarklet ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and there is no limit in a user script size, which isn't the case of a bookmarklet (even though you can execute external scripts from a bookmarklet)
Re:Buy The Research? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know for sure, but it seems obvious to me.
The "Executive Summary" is so full of unsubstatiated assumptions and blatant slant that it is unlikely that the "research" would actually contain any real information.
(I suspect that this kind of "research" is used to support forgone conclusions that need a little extra credibility to show the ignorant.)
Not far from the truth (Score:3, Informative)
Funny you should mention that. My first introduction to FrontPage was working on a non-profit website. They wanted me to make some "quick changes" to their site. I looked at their site-- it was a GIANT IMAGE of a webpage (text and all), with image maps and rollovers for links. The page could have been laid out with tables with no problems (this was in the ugly days before the DOM and CSS), but their previous web designer opted for
Re:Fucking Moron (Score:3, Interesting)