[Greasemonkey] Cannot use GreaseMonkey :-(

[Tony Chang]

On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 10:33:05AM +0100, Simon Willison wrote:
> It strikes me that the usability involved with Greasemonkey are very
> similar to the ones involved with RSS feeds - it's counter-intuitive
> to have to be looking at a page full of meaningless code (meaningless
> unless you know JavaScript) in order to install it.

I agree that this is a problem as multiple people have asked about this
on the mailing list.

However, I think that user scripts are a bit different than RSS feeds in
that viewing them before installing them has a purpose (if you know
javascript).

I wonder if it's possible to get the warning toolbar (the thingy that
displays when popup windows are blocked or a plugin isn't installed) to
pop up when you're viewing a .user.js file?  Having some text and a
button for installing the user script there sounds more intuitive than
navigating to the tools menu.

Additionally, greasemonkey could style links to .user.js files
differently and add a tooltip saying you can right click to install the
user script.  Maybe this could ship as a pre-installed user script so
users can disable it if they don't want the feature.

Tony


> The RSS/Atom/etc community are still looking for a solution to this
> three years on - so far the best I've seen is Safari 2.0 and OS X
> Tiger, where you can set your default RSS reader and then clicking on
> the blue RSS logo in Safari will subscribe you in it. I think they
> did that with a custom feed:// URL scheme.
> 
> Would a custom mime type for user scripts work? The reason feed:// is
> needed in feed syndication is that the application to which the feed
> is passed needs to know it's URL - otherwise a mime type would work
> fine. Of course, the problem with custom mime types is that they
> require server administrators to configure them, which can be
> difficult to impossible for people on shared hosting plans.
> The .user.js thing works well as a fallback in that case though.
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-- 
Tony Chang
http://ponderer.org