[Greasemonkey] Apply Script Now – ex post facto

[Nikolas Coukouma]

Roderick McGuire wrote:
> 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.
(snip)
A good chunk of the point of Greasemonkey is convenience. Bookmarklets
do exactly what you describe. Also, it's easy to modify a script so that
it only runs when asked. I've done this a few times for the reasons
you've described.

> 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.
I don't think it's Greasemonkey's job to police scripts. Firefox doesn't
check for conflicting extensions.

The only way I can think of is making a complete copy of the document
for each user script and merging changes. While I suppose this could be
done, it seems extremely expensive and complicated with little benefit.
It seems that it should be rare to have so many user scripts running at
the same time for it to be an issue. For scripts that are are difficult
to untangle, it seems reasonable to merge them. I'd suspect that they're
doing similar jobs if they're fiddling with similar parts of the DOM.

Just some thoughts.

-Nikolas