Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

As you noted, TM is closed-source. However, GM is very sparsely developed after the switch to webextensions—still no script management interface, as far as I can see. TM whips it in terms of features. VM appeared recently in the FF land, and my guess is, it's for those who hope for faster development—however dunno if those hopes are realized, feature-wise.

My main use case for user scripts is to automatically authenticate on brain dead corporate sites. webex is one example where you cannot save name/password in the browser per default.

This is why my extensions are limited to highly trusted and highly essential ones like ublock. I just can't trust extensions to be good now and good forever after. Its way to tempting for an extension developer to sell it on to an ad corp.

Both you and the article recommend not to run ViolentMonkey on Firefox. Why?

I’ve written extensive user scripts to improve inferior web interfaces of tools that we use for work. My two biggest ones are for a work tracker and a support system. The support system one especially is considered indispensable by the support staff and almost everyone else that ever interacts with it. (Why not just change support system?—you may ask. There were certain features that provided the concrete reason for staying with that one. And in bigger businesses you often don’t have the flexibility to choose different things anyway.)

A fair fraction of the user scripting is actually just stylesheets, and indeed I started out with just user stylesheets. It’s amazing what you can do with such stylesheets. You can reduce borders, margin and spacing, reorder sections with flexbox and/or grid layout, hide irrelevant functionality or data fields that you never use but the tool doesn’t let you hide, emphasise details that are important to you, reduce the need for scrolling (more efficient layout is routinely able to make things 30–50% shorter without feeling in any way cramped, because many layouts are simply unnecessarily wasteful of space), make sidebars sticky to save scrolling, increase the size of elements and popups that are inexplicably small with forced scrolling, and loads more.

And that’s just the styles part. Add scripting and you can do things like set the document title because the system just sets “AppName” or “Manage Request”; automatically click on “load more” links; restructure content for better consumption; in history streams collapse automated things with a single line summary, or bulky tables of the fields that changed with more compact representation; highlight things differently based on the result of some function on the element (e.g. who wrote it), change how times are presented (e.g. replace an absolute timestamp with absolute and relative, plus showing other timezones that could be relevant in a tooltip); add a button to copy the ID or link for an item; and much more that I haven’t even thought of yet.

My user scripts are readily configurable: each feature can be turned on or off independently, since a few of the features some people like and others don’t.

I’ve thought and said before that this should be a plausible business: forced to use a web app that’s slowing you down? Hire me and I’ll make it easier and faster for you to use. I guarantee improved happiness and at least some productivity boost, and enormous productivity boosts are possible, like orders of magnitude in some cases, by better information presentation and automating arduous human-driven tasks.

There’s always the danger that the app will change underneath you, but this isn’t often a problem.

If you’re interested in this idea and have any web apps that you might like help with making a user script to improve, email me at userscripts@chrismorgan.info.