[Greasemonkey] a difference in vision

[Nikolas Coukouma]

Nikolas Coukouma wrote:

> Matthew Gertner wrote:
>
>> Evan,
>>
>> Awesome that you are raising this. You make a lot of great points. At 
>> the
>> same time, I think you are conflating two different issues:
>>
>> 1) The increasing overlap between Greasemonkey and extensions. I 
>> mentioned
>> this as a problem a while ago and the silence was deafening
>> (http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/greasemonkey/2005-April/001438.html). I
>> still believe what I said in that mail, however: in an ideal world, the
>> capabilities that GM provides would be inherent in the Mozilla extension
>> mechanism, which would have the advantages of Greasemonkey (rapid
>> development and deployment, *especially* the fact that you don't have to
>> keep restarting Firefox). GM'd get versioning, update and so forth, and
>> extensions would get a whole bunch of cool junk too. You can call this
>> "creature feep" but to me it's just plain obvi-farking-ous.
>>
> Note: Firefox 1.1 supports dynamic overlays, which should greatly 
> reduce (if not eliminate) restarts during extension development. 
> Because of this, I'd like to poke at some sort of rapid extension 
> development tool. I think the extensions developer extension might 
> already cover this, but I haven't played with the new FF features yet.
>
> -Nikolas Coukouma 

Oh, so, I'm hoping that this means that Greasemonkey can focus on 
tweaking web pages instead of trying to do XUL injection or some 
craziness in the future. As soon as you touch chrome, I think you're out 
of Greasemonkey's scope. Menu commands are pushing it. It just saves 
adding a menu div.

I think we're going to see Greasemonkey (& relatives) and extensions 
approach each other over time. For example, I'd like to play with making 
"HTML overlays" similar to XUL ones. That would cover the people who 
want to embed HTML nicely and be perfect for platypus. One of the nice 
things about working within DOM is that it's loosly equivalent to well 
formed XML.

The future will be interesting.

-Nikolas Coukouma