[HN Gopher] Violentmonkey - An open source userscript manager
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       Violentmonkey - An open source userscript manager
        
       Author : homarp
       Score  : 52 points
       Date   : 2021-02-07 08:24 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (violentmonkey.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (violentmonkey.github.io)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | cbsks wrote:
       | What differentiates this from Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey?
        
         | livre wrote:
         | It's important to know why the three exist.
         | 
         | Greasemonkey is the original Firefox extension, the development
         | slowed down/stopped when Firefox changed how extensions work,
         | it was restarted later. It's kind of heavyweight but very
         | compatible with most scripts because it's the original.
         | 
         | Tampermonkey started as Chrome's alternative to Greasemonkey
         | (because the latter was only for Firefox). I don't recommend
         | it, see this[1]
         | 
         | Violentmonkey started as an Opera extension (back when Opera
         | was using the Presto engine and wasn't compatible with Chrome
         | extensions). It's more lightweight in terms of resource usage
         | than Greasemonkey and doesn't contain analytics code. It was
         | later ported to Firefox and Chrome.
         | 
         | If you need compatibility with old scripts your best choice is
         | Greasemonkey. If you need it for modern scripts or to write
         | your own Violentmonkey is fine. Avoid Tampermonkey, they are
         | not to be trusted (proprietary license and analytics).
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6hs59w/tampermonke...
        
           | pidg wrote:
           | I use Violentmonkey - I can't remember why, but I probably
           | installed it due to the Firefox issues years ago and carried
           | on using it. No complaints here.
        
           | Wowfunhappy wrote:
           | Is Chrome's native userscript support completely dead, then?
           | I remember there was a time when you could install stuff
           | right off of Userscripts.org, without an extension...
        
           | toyg wrote:
           | It would be fair to link the developer response: https://www.
           | reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6hs59w/tampermonke...
           | 
           |  _> "There is no "they" in Tampermonkey. It's just me, a
           | developer from Germany [...] I don't have the resources that
           | large companies do have for testing. I have a regular job
           | (40-hour workweek) and besides this I also spent some time
           | with my wife and my daughter. And finally, and this is the
           | most important one, there are too many unknowns. There are
           | forks of almost every browser, each with slight differences
           | and every new browser version can break things. [...] TL; DR:
           | The Tampermonkey developer needs some data to become aware of
           | bugs happening in the wild. You can disable it. All data is
           | anonymized to the developer. No browsing data is collected."_
        
       | preya2k wrote:
       | Spent about two minutes on the website and could not find out
       | what "userscript support for browsers" means. Literally could not
       | figure out, what this thing does - and I have a degree in CS.
       | Maybe it's just me who's not in the know, but I think that's
       | something a documentation/website should always deliver: a high
       | level description for out-of-domain people explaining what a
       | piece of software does.
        
         | williamjackson wrote:
         | I suspect the target demographic already knows what a
         | userscript is.
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Userscript
        
         | eznzt wrote:
         | Maybe you need a master's on Google:
         | https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=userscrip...
        
           | preya2k wrote:
           | That's not what I'm trying to say. Obviously I can google
           | this. I still think documentation should say within a couple
           | of words what a piece of software does - without having a lot
           | of domain knowledge.
        
         | vezycash wrote:
         | It's hard to explain. Browse through to see lists of userscript
         | 
         | https://userscripts-mirror.org/
         | 
         | https://openuserjs.org/
        
         | cookie_monsta wrote:
         | How far down the stack does that requirement go, though?
         | Anybody who knows what a userscript is will know why they need
         | a userscript manager and anybody who doesn't won't need one.
         | The homepages for Firefox and Chrome don't explain what a
         | browser does, nor what the WWW is, or a webpage, etc, etc
        
       | account-5 wrote:
       | Genuine question, where do I find out more information about
       | where to go to learn how to write userscripts? Im able to write
       | bookmarklets for simple stuff but I've never been able to find a
       | good comprehensive guide about where to start with these. Im not
       | a webdev and my JavaScript is basic at best.
        
         | nicoburns wrote:
         | It's very very similar to writing on-page JavaScript. Your
         | script basically just gets injected into the page by the
         | extension. So it's all the standard webdev stuff you'd want to
         | learn: JavaScript, the DOM apis and CSS.
        
         | toyg wrote:
         | https://wiki.greasespot.net/Greasemonkey_Manual
        
       | yoavm wrote:
       | I just tried this last week and wrote this tiny Userscript that
       | redirect Youtube videos to their .mp4 source file, so nothing is
       | actually loaded except the video itself. No ads, no "watch
       | next!", no related movies, no comments.                 //
       | ==UserScript==       // @name youtube-redirect       // @match
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch*       // @run-at document-start
       | // @version          1.0       // ==/UserScript==
       | window.stop();       GM.fetch("https://alltubedownload.net/json?u
       | rl="+document.location).then(x=>
       | window.location=JSON.parse(x).url);
        
       | kodablah wrote:
       | My dream (and something I may build given the time) is a large
       | set of curated, regularly updated scripts using headless browser
       | automation (e.g. playwright) to provide popular website services
       | (e.g. FB, Twitter, etc) as a local API I could build a portal UI
       | against. No separate server doing this, just desktop client side
       | headless browser automation.
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-07 23:00 UTC)