[Greasemonkey] Greasemonkey or a filtering proxy?

[Jeff Barr]

drac wrote:

> The disadvantages of the Greasemonkey approach (as opposed to a
> filtering proxy) is that one is compelled to move the scripts over to
> each machine you'd use instead of just pointing to the identical
> filtering proxy. And also, Greasemonkey is browser specific (Turnabout
> and Opera user scripts notwithstanding - there are differences between
> Opera's implementation and GM, for example). Applying transforms at
> the proxy level instead of at the browser level save us from the
> quirks and idiosyncrasies of how individual browsers implement their
> DOM and transform API.

Yes, this is a specific instance of a general problem with 
application configuration. Firefox seems to make it worse 
because it is so easy to extend and because there are so 
many worthwhile extensions. And with the advent of GM we 
have an extension that itself has extensions.

I have this perfect picture (in my head) of an application
that would let me click a bunch of checkboxes in a matrix
to keep all of my Firefox instances in sync and up to date:

+------------------------------------------------------+
|             Home Desktop    Laptop    Office Desktop |
| Greasemonkey   [ ]             [ ]          [ ]      |
| Web Developer  [ ]             [ ]          [ ]      |
| Aardvark       [ ]             [ ]          [ ]      |
|   ...           .               .            .       |
| GM Ext #1      [ ]             [ ]          [ ]      |
| GM Ext #2      [ ]             [ ]          [ ]      |
|   ...           .               .            .       |
+------------------------------------------------------+

Ideally this config state would be stored in a central 
location, and when I start up a browser from any machine
it would fetch the config and load new extensions as
needed.

Jeff;

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