[Greasemonkey] Cannot use GreaseMonkey :-(

[Simon Willison]

On 4 Jun 2005, at 18:17, Tony Chang wrote:
> 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.

That's a great idea! A nice big panel with "This is a Greasemonkey  
user script. Click here to install it" would be much, much more  
obvious than the current greyed-out menu option. Modelling it after  
the "this site tried to install an extension but wasn't allowed to"  
panel is a good idea up to a point, but it needs a nice big monkey  
face to make it obvious that it's related to Greasemonkey. Users  
don't read stuff.

Cheers,

Simon