54 items tagged “greasemonkey”
2020
Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications (via) What a fascinating collection of ideas. Wildcard is a browser extension (currently using Tampermonkey and sadly not yet available to try out) which lets you add “spreadsheet-driven customization” to any web application. Watching the animated screenshots in the videos helps explain what this mean—essentially it’s a two-way scraping trick, where content on the page (e.g. Airbnb listings) are extracted into a spreadsheet-like table interface using JavaScript—but then interactions you make in that spreadsheet like filtering and sorting are reflected back on the original page. It even has the ability to serve editable cells by mapping them to form inputs on the page. Lots to think about here.
2009
OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript. John dissects the brilliant Greasemonkey script that solves simple captchas using the canvas element and HTML5’s getImageData API.
Crowbar. Headless Gecko/XULRunner which exposes a web service API for screen scraping using a real browser DOM—just pass it the URL of a page and the URL of a screen scraping JavaScript script (a bit like a Greasemonkey user script) and get back RDF/XML.
2008
BUG: XSS Security flaw in BaseCamp Messages (via) BaseCamp lets users include HTML and JavaScript in messages, on the basis that anyone with a BaseCamp account is a trusted party. I’m not convinced: you could use this to circumvent BaseCamp’s access control stuff and read messages you’re not meant to. On the flip side, you could also use this to add brand new features to BaseCamp by using JavaScript in a message as a server-side equivalent to Greasemonkey.
2007
google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later.
Gmail Greasemonkey API (via) The new version of Gmail includes API hooks for Greasemonkey script authors. The documentation is by Mark Pilgrim, author of Greasemonkey Hacks.
Site-specific browsers and GreaseKit. New site-specific browser tool which lets you include a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts. For me, the killer feature of site-specific browsers is still cookie isolation (to minimise the impact of XSS and CSRF holes) but none of the current batch of tools advertise this as a feature, and most seem to want to share the system-wide cookie jar.
Anyone who recently downloaded GreaseMonkey scripts from userscripts.org should check their scripts. I haven’t confirmed this, but this Jyte claim suggests that userscripts.org was hacked and cookie stealing code inserted in to some of the scripts. UPDATE: Not hacked; just bad scripts submitted through the regular process.
2006
Greasemonkey 0.6.5—2.0 support and localization. First release in nearly 8 months. Great to see it’s still ticking over.
Campfire Bot. Campfire + Greasemonkey = Bot. How long until there’s a Google Talk one of these?
2005
Canvas demos
Jesse Andrews (of Book Burro and userscripts.org fame) has built some awesome canvas demos for users of Safari or Firefox 1.5. He has a bar chart and some animated rectangles, but the real gem is the live chart which polls a server using XMLHttpRequest and updates a line graph with live data. He also has some fun mathematical experiments: a cellular automata generator and a neat exploration of Lindenmayer systems (both static and interactive). Read more on his blog.
More fun with the monkey
Cory Doctorow points to America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945, with the following observation:
[... 329 words]scribbly. Greasemonkey + canvas.
Firefox 1.5-compatible Greasemonkey beta now available. I’d been waiting for this.
[Greasemonkey] Monkey Do. User script that automatically posts interesting things to del.icio.us.
Chapter 4. Common Patterns [Dive Into Greasemonkey]. Greasemonkey patterns.
MagicLine. Greasemonkey + microformats killer app. You just HAVE to check this out.
Jeff Barr on Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey for "Enterprise Application Integration".
Despite the odd name, Greasemonkey embodies a very cool and somewhat unique concept, something that I am starting to think of as low-budget, client-side application integration. In the late 90’s, “EAI” or Enterprise Application Integration, was all the rage. Companies that had the need to make disparate applications work together would spend tens of thousands of dollars on complex, fragile software to make it happen. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t, they would call in armies of even more expensive consultants.
Now, I’ll be the first to say that Greasemonkey in its present form isn’t quite ready to replace expensive, commercial EAI software. However, I do believe that it belongs in the enterprise developer’s tookit of possible solutions, and I also believe that Greasemonkey will gain features, power, and respect over the coming months and that now is the time to learn more about it.
[Greasemonkey] A whole other kind of monkey. Help Aaron test the new, hopefully secure, Greasemonkey.
Understanding the Greasemonkey vulnerability
If you have any version of Greasemonkey installed prior to 0.3.5, which was released a few hours ago, or if you are running any of the 0.4 alphas, you need to go and upgrade right now. All versions of Greasemonkey aside from 0.3.5 contain a nasty security hole, which could enable malicious web sites to read any file from your hard drive without you knowing.
[... 809 words]LUG Radio Live
I’ve been very busy for the last three days. My last two exams (HCI and Marketing) were on Thursday evening and Friday morning respectively, followed by a celebratory barbecue. I was up at 7am on Saturday to get up to Wolverhampton for LUG Radio Live, then back to Bath again by 5.30pm for our graduation summer ball. Finally, I’m heading off to Denmark in the early hours of Monday morning for a week and a bit of camping and Roskilde Let’s hope it’s a bit drier than Glastonbury was.
[... 322 words]Magic Microformat Forms Redux, Now with GreaseMonkey! Les Orchard gets in to Greasemonkey—with accompanying screencast.
Workplace absuridities as phone support for a DSL ISP. Greasemonkey used to fix web application leads to misguided Firefox ban.
Tweaking Wikipedia
Does anyone know why Wikipedia displays a redirected page at the same URL rather than using a proper HTTP redirect? Case in point: Topics in human-computer interaction actually displays the content from List of human-computer interaction topics (that’s my next exam topic)—the same content appears at two different URLs. Yuck. Here’s a Greasemonkey script to fix it: wikipedia-redirect.user.js.
[... 125 words]Trixie: Greasemonkey for IE (via) Second attempt—but it’s still closed source.
[Greasemonkey] a difference in vision. Check out the last paragraph. I got a kick out of it.
Greasemonkey: Yet Another Reason to Use Firefox. Great writeup of Greasemonkey on the PC World Techlog(!)
Tweaking WordPress With Greasemonkey (via) More application interface enhancements.
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.
[... 101 words]Wired News: Firefox Users Monkey With the Web. Greasemonkey on Wired—and I get quoted!