Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

Tampermonkey, ViolentMonkey and GreaseMonkey are all available in Firefox.

Can anyone provide a comparison?

Edit for the early commenters: as I stated, all of the above are available on current Firefox. Greasemonkey also has been ported to webextensions. Hence my question.

Edit 2:

TamperMonkey is closed source source and apparently embeds Google Analytics. Either of those immediately kill it for me, considering the kind of access the addon gets.

ViolentMonkey "does not collect user data at the moment", but also allows for it in the privacy policy.

I think I'll stick with GreaseMonkey.

From tfa: “you simply install ViolentMonkey (on Chrome, use TamperMonkey for other browsers)”

Greasemonkey is old news.

Here's a short relevant Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9uemks/greasemonke...

Though I wrote Greasemonkey originally, I have no idea regarding the answer to this question. What I can say is that Anthony Lieuallen is a super standup guy, which is why I handed it over to him and Johan way back. Based on that alone, I personally continue to use GM whenever I have a need.

One difference: Tampermonkey is closed source while ViolentMonkey and Greasemonkey are MIT licensed.

> We could create a browser extension, but that means developing one for all major browsers.

Personally, I use most of the extensions I've written in userscript form via Greasemonkey for the convenience of being able to drop straight into editing and testing it when I spot something which could be added or needs to be fixed.

If your userscript doesn't depend on any APIs provided by the userscript manager you're using, you can package it up as a WebExtension by adding a manifest.json:

    {
      "manifest_version": 2,
      "name": "Your Userscript",
      "version": "1.0",
      "content_scripts": [
        {
          "matches": [
            "https://example.com/*",
          ],
          "js": [
            "./your-userscript.user.js"
          ]
        }
      ]
    }

Once you've dropped a manifest.json in, web-ext [1] is handy for running extensions in Firefox and Chrome in a temporary profile/developer mode. It also reloads the extension when you make changes.

This is particularly useful if your script grows to the point where it could benefit from an options screen, as you can configure `"options_ui": {"page": "options.html"}` instead of having to hack an options UI into the target site yourself.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext