[Greasemonkey] Question: what would happen ifGreasemonkeysenttheID of every applicable user script with eachrequest?

[Julien Couvreur]

There are two problems discussed in this thread:
- do we want to send the information? how to choose when to send it?
- how (technically) do we send the information?

I'm going to focus on the first problem, as I'm sure the second
problem is solvable.

It comes down to whether GM should stay stealth/invisible, and what is
the impact of making GM visible.
Staying stealth or not doesn't fundamentally change anything. Trying
to stay invisible only slow things down because websites are not aware
of GM. Website that know of GM can still try to detect it (check for
DOM tampering, check script repository), block it (obfuscation) or sue
the script writers.

On the other hand, a reasonable implementation of GM headers (with
global opt-out and per-site opt-out, both configured by the user)
raises the awareness, provides better information quality (not only do
you know which scripts are available for a site, the site can tell
which ones and how popular they are). And it doesn't create any new
problem.

Worst case, the feature gets reverted later, and it only created
awareness. To me, the GM header is only fast-forwarding the
discussion, but has little/no impact on the possible outcomes.

Avoiding the problem is not solving anything, just buying time.
Implementing the header shows that we are not enemies with publishers,
and we are taking steps to collaborate within reasonnable boundaries
(which is they don't react stupidly otherwise they don't get the
header). It can have some positive outcomes, but doesn't create any
negative outcomes that weren't possible anyways.

What is the downside of implementing this feature as an
experimentation? Awareness is unavoidable, why slow it down?
The UA string statistics were only a good thing for Firefox adoption
and awareness.

What constitutes a failure for this feature? 
If some sites don't serve content when they detect GM? That's likely
to happen (some publishers are lame), and would probably happen even
without that feature.
I don't know that some publishers will take that information and do
something good with it, but if only one does, then it's a success.
It's also a success if it simply raises awareness of the possibilities
of customizing and remixing the web.

Cheers,
Julien


http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000247.html (Detecting AdBlock:
conflicts and collaboration)