[Greasemonkey] Apply Script Now – ex post facto

[Roderick McGuire]

Now that greasemonkey scripts have been sandboxed there is no longer any 
real connection between reading a web page and applying a script to it. 
Maybe users should be able to say when to apply a script.

At http://userscripts.org/ I have seen several scripts such as:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/997 Myspace custom style remover

The point of this script is to remove site-user generated styles because 
the rendered page is very hard to read. In most cases, viewing pages 
from this site is not difficult so the recommended practice is to keep 
the script off, and then only when you have a problem, do you turn on 
the script and reload the page, and then turn off the script for other 
page views from this site. (and I have seen numerous other scripts for 
sites that have problems like this).

At now, you can right-click the little monkey-head at the right bottom 
of the window to turn on or off scripts. Why not elaborate that menu so 
that that you can click that the current page should run a non-active 
script? This would keep people from going through the activate, reload, 
un-activate nonsense.

A big question is whether activating a script on a non active URL should 
add that URL to the active list – should the URL be added to the list of 
URLs that the script automatically applies to?

I run several userscripts many of which really don’t need to be active 
if I could only say: ”activate the script for this page”. The problem is 
that the scripts can alter the DOM and other scripts are expecting an 
un-altered DOM.