Flutterby™! : Dive into Greasemonkey

Next unread comment / Catchup all unread comments User Account Info | Logout | XML/Pilot/etc versions | Long version (with comments) | Weblog archives | Site Map | | Browse Topics

Dive into Greasemonkey

2005-05-12 22:10:12.214625+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Crap: Yet another platform that might be interesting (although it might drag me away from Opera). If you haven't heard about Greasemonkey, it's a Firefox add-in that lets you process pages. Specifically, it might let one kill off bad JavaScript (no, that isn't always redundant), like the "pop-to-front when the page has finished loading" behavior of uComics, or those sites which muck with which input has focus so that by the time the page finishes loading you find that you've typed partial data into three different inputs, or the "no, you can't use back and then click on that search button again" behavior that I've whined about.

Now Mark Pilgrim has Dive Into Greasemonkey, which, if it's as good as Dive Into Python, might give me no more excuses for whining about bad JavaScript.

Hell, maybe it'll even fix Flickr...

[ related topics: Web development Open Source Python ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-13 20:12:28.444602+00 by: Jerry Kindall [edit history]

Greasemonkey really kicks ass. It has made the sites I visit on a regular basis much more usable. The best thing is, you don't have to wait for sites to fix usability issues. If something is annoying you, chances are excellent that someone else was annoyed too and wrote a user script to fix it. Some of the scripts are quite extensive. The only thing I worry about is that sites will begin to include tricks to try to prevent Greasemonkey scripts from working. For example, server-side code to randomly change the names of elements and insert random numbers of dummy elements so that scripts can't find the element to be modified.