[Greasemonkey] Greasemonkey or a filtering proxy?

[Jeff Barr]

Preston,

Great question.

If all that you want to do is simple text filtering, then a 
filtering proxy could do this just as well as Greasemonkey.

However, Greasemonkey lets you do a lot more than simple 
text filtering. By providing full read-write access to the 
parsed object model of the page (the DOM), Greasemonkey is 
powerful enough to admit scripts that inspect, change, and 
capture events across the entire page. A filtering proxy 
would essentially have to be a full-fledged browser in order 
to do all of this, and I think that the programming model 
for such a beast would be a lot harder to learn. I don't 
even want to think about how hard it would be to deal with 
events across what would end up as two tiers of web servers.

Greasemonkey puts the power in the hands of the user. 
Getting corporate IT to install Greasemonkey-like scripts on 
a filtering proxy would end up as a bureaucratic nightmare 
in many organizations.

Finally, having the work take place in the browser makes 
everything totally transparent. A knowledgable user can see 
exactly what scripts are applied and what they are doing. 
There are all sorts of dastardly things that could be done 
with access to a filtering proxy that wasn't totally 
accessible, configurable, and transparent.

If I was an "evil corporate mastermind" I could alter the 
news in subtle ways, I could change stock quotes, I could 
censor stuff, and so forth. A sly person could manipulate 
some scripts to influence an entire organization in some 
way. I think I would have a hard time trusting a remote 
filtering proxy installed by my organization "for my own good."

Jeff;

Presto Wk wrote:
> The idea of letting users modify web content as Greasemonkey does is
> no doubt a hit.  However, to understand this phenomenon in a slightly
> wider perspective: why would one choose to do the filtering in the
> browser, as Greasemonkey does, as opposed to in a filtering web proxy?
> 
> A major advantage of a filtering web proxy is the modularization: the
> filtering is browser-independent.  What is a major reason for
> performing the filtering in the browser, as Greasemonkey does,
> effectively becoming browser-dependent?
> 
> As far as I can tell, a filtering proxy that at the lowest level works
> by text substitution should still be capable of what Greasemonkey now
> does, with the advantage of browser-independence.
> 
> p.
> 
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