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Fixing web applications with Greasemonkey

In Greasemonkey FUD, I highlighted the importance of Greasemonkey as a tool for fixing interface problems in “enterprise” web applications. DJ Adams has done exactly that for OSS Notes, part of the SAP service portal. His user script ditches the frames in the interface, makes the page title more useful and adds hyperlinks to other note references on the page—significantly improving the user experience in less than 40 lines of code. The improvements are clearly explained in the accompanying screencast.

Spotted via Jeremy on the Greasemonkey mailing list.

Posted 24th May 2005 at 1:59 am

This is Fixing web applications with Greasemonkey by Simon Willison, posted on 24th May 2005.

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7 comments

  1. A couple "issues"...
    • top.document.location = document.location: This will break the back button and is bad practice. location.replace() is better suited. In fact, he should probably just set the top frame height to 0 and change top.document.title. That will save from jumping pages at all.
    • No anonymous function wrapper. With variable names like "node", "s", and "newNode", you are almost sure to run into problems. Even if you don't, it is bad practice.
    Other than that, cool stuff.

    David Schontzler - 24th May 2005 02:32 - #

  2. Good point on the frames stuff. I think the most recent releases of Greasemonkey add the anonymous function wrapper for you, so you should be safe from accidental namespace clashes.

    Simon Willison - 24th May 2005 03:18 - #

  3. Simon and David

    Thanks for the comments and pointers. I'm a Javascript newbie and am willing to learn. In checking this difference (location= vs location.replace()) I can't seem to see any difference in the Back button, i.e. the Back button is not broken when I use top.document.location = document.location.

    What am I missing?

    Cheers!
    dj

    DJ Adams - 24th May 2005 08:11 - #

  4. I just disabled Greasemonkey after my Firefox repeatedly grew to around 150 MB in RAM over the course of a day. Disabling Greasemonkey helped. Anybody else have similar experiences? Could it be only one of the userscripts?

    Sencer - 24th May 2005 08:17 - #

  5. Hey Sencer, there's a mailing list for that sort of thing. :)

    My FF used a bunch of memory yesterday, but I didn't think anything of it because I was doing several pretty abusive things with it.

    Jeremy Dunck - 24th May 2005 16:02 - #

  6. It doesn't get much more "enterprise" than PeopleSoft, and its numbingly repetitive time punch entry UI is painful, so a fellow University of Florida employee made Day Punch to memorize your weekly schedule and bring day entries down to one click. It saves us so much time.

    Stephen Clay - 6th June 2005 03:02 - #

  7. covers PHP, Python, CSS, XML, and general web development shenquanqi1@yahoo.com

    biil gates - 10th July 2005 04:24 - #

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