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Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

dutzi.party

61–70 of 145 posts

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#61
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even an MIT licensed extension can be changed on a whim and pushed through update - and browsers make it deliberately inconvenient to run a local extension checkout long-term. I have a chip on my shoulder here, because i was the victim of when the de-facto analogous extension for CSS, Stylish, silently changed ownership and violated my privacy without ever prompting me to accept any new ToS. No userscript or extensio…

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.

uBlock is not highly trusted. You are looking for uBlock Origin.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#63
I installed TamperMonkey recently and wrote some scripts to improve my Twitter experience. Very handy. Then it popped up a request for donations screen, which is an understandable approach by the TamperMonkey author, but I became uncomfortable that TamperMonkey was watching everything I did on the web and reporting back to the author, so I uninstalled it.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#64
post #16

If somebody could tell me how to use user scripts and user CSS on Brave mobile, I'd be a happy person.

Kiwi browser has full extension support. Firefox for android is scheduled to drop support for all extensions except ONE. And add them back with time.

Thus I've not updated mine in weeks. So I don't know the status of the version on play store.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#65
post #55

Given the increasingly hostile nature of websites, along with the tendency to remove user control, userscripts are not just still relevant but more relevant than ever. Here's some that I like: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/10096-general-url-cleaner https://greasyfork.org/fr/scripts/19210-google-direct-links-... https://github.com/ParticleCore/Iridium

Why use a userscript when you can use a search engine that is not from a spyware company? Like Startpage, Qwant, Duckduckgo or Searx? Alleluia, direct links out of the box. For youtube, why not give Invidious a try (ok, it has its downs)? Sometimes, the best solution to "hostile websites" is to not use them in the first place (or use their proxified versions).

I wanted to love DDG. It promises a lot. And it delivers a lot. I love the shortcut codes.

But after a few months I had to go back to Google. Two main reasons:

1. Image searches could often return literally zero results for simple terms.

2. I'd look up a term and get non-English Wikipedia articles before the English ones, which often wouldn't even show up.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#66
post #43
post #2

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 k…

I've stuck with Greasemonkey myself too. My reason is a bit more esoteric -- I use a user script which adds a dicebear.io/adorable.io avatars based on usernames on HN (I find it easier to remember commenters by the avatar/username combo rather than just username), and Greasemonkey seems to have been the only one out of the three to successfully bypass HN's CSP rules and show the actual hotlinked images.

Can you please name or link the avatar script? Search fu is failing me.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#67
post #59
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried my best to switch to DDG this year. The results just aren't as good as Google.

Startpage: "You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs." Searx is a meta search engine. You can gather results from gogle.

RE Startpage, sounds good, seems to work... how are they making money to pay Google?

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#68
post #49

Are userscripts still run once after page load? That was a major pain point last time I tried using them, on a dynamic page. I tried hooking some events and run-registered-function-on-tree-change-but-at-most-at-N-msec-intervals, but it got out of hand and ended up looking to take much more time to write than the handler it was going to call, so I filed it under "should be written once and properly" and postponed the…

MutationObserver should do the trick if you can pick elements which consistently change at times you'd want to re-run. Watching for changes tends to be good for single page apps.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#69
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use a userscript when you can use a search engine that is not from a spyware company? Like Startpage, Qwant, Duckduckgo or Searx? Alleluia, direct links out of the box. For youtube, why not give Invidious a try (ok, it has its downs)? Sometimes, the best solution to "hostile websites" is to not use them in the first place (or use their proxified versions).

I wanted to love DDG. It promises a lot. And it delivers a lot. I love the shortcut codes. But after a few months I had to go back to Google. Two main reasons: 1. Image searches could often return literally zero results for simple terms. 2. I'd look up a term and get non-English Wikipedia articles before the English ones, which often wouldn't even show up.

IMO it's not about "going back to" anywhere. It's not as if we couldn't use different search engines for different queries.

This all-or-nothing mentality of migrating away from Google (the search engine) seems flawed to me. It's still better for your privacy doing half of your queries using Google, instead of doing all of them.

By the way, no offense intended! We're all free to pick our tools.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to love DDG. It promises a lot. And it delivers a lot. I love the shortcut codes. But after a few months I had to go back to Google. Two main reasons: 1. Image searches could often return literally zero results for simple terms. 2. I'd look up a term and get non-English Wikipedia articles before the English ones, which often wouldn't even show up.

IMO it's not about "going back to" anywhere. It's not as if we couldn't use different search engines for different queries. This all-or-nothing mentality of migrating away from Google (the search engine) seems flawed to me. It's still better for your privacy doing half of your queries using Google, instead of doing all of them. By the way, no offense intended! We're all free to pick our tools.

I partly agree. I don't want it to be all or nothing. But the way browsers are set up with the "default search", it somwhat is.

Ooooh I would love to be able to custom route searches depending on rules.

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