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Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

dutzi.party

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Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#81

Post by cerberusss »

Waterluvian wrote: post #70
setzer22 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've set Firefox its default search engine to DDG. Then if the search results are unsatisfying, I search again but now prepend the search with !g for Google, or !gi for Google Images.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#82

Post by rossvor »

frumiousirc wrote: post #66
rossvor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. https://openuserjs.org/scripts/rossvor/Hacker_News_avatars

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#83

Post by gowld »

Hendrikto wrote: post #61
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a real life case of "why should I have to chanher my name? He's the one that sucks!" I wish gorhill would get over it and change the name so naive users stop getting victimized by uBlock.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#84

Post by iudqnolq »

insin wrote: post #10

> 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…

I thought web-ext was only for Firefox, and I didn't see anything in the Readme about Chrome?

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#85

Post by berelig »

gruez wrote: post #71
tomxor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to offer a less binary perspective... I tried to switch and ended up using both, I use duckduckgo not for privacy but practical reasons: recently google has become extremely irritating for technical searches that are not popular, even for the ones it can find it now autocorrects them by default to "what it thinks you meant", which for technical things like parameter names, command names, APIs etc are always…

>SEO optimization Search engine optimization optimization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#86

Post by lozf »

Waterluvian wrote: post #65
Ileca wrote: 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.

It's pretty easy to append "!g" to your ddg search results if they're inadequate.

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#87

Post by insin »

iudqnolq wrote: post #84
insin wrote: post #10

> 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…

I thought web-ext was only for Firefox, and I didn't see anything in the Readme about Chrome?

Looks like it's only in the release notes [1] - I only spotted it recently myself while updating an extension, it's:

    web-ext run --target chromium
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext/releases

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#88

Post by gklitt »

Strongly agree with the original article, and it's fun to see all the niche use cases that people are mentioning here.

But I have a major frustration with user scripts: writing them requires experience with Javascript and reverse engineering websites. This is fine for the HN crowd, but locks out most web users, who can't program at all.

I bet that if it were slightly easier to develop user scripts, there'd be 10x as many of them. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's helped a coworker write a bookmarklet / user script essential for their workplace sanity.

Would be curious what people's experiences have been helping nontechnical people extend websites, or if you know of tools in this area.

My current attempt at this is a project called Wildcard, which requires a programmer to write some site-specific scraping code, but then shows the scraped data to the end user in a spreadsheet and lets them decide what to do with it:

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/salon2020/

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#89

Post by netcraft »

So the last time I tried to make an extension (I believe in chrome) for an application I work on, I could not access data stored in the global object - I was trying to make data available to the extension to do more with and show like debug information. Can you access js variables with userscripts like you could in the developer console?

Re: Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

#90

Post by [deleted] »

gklitt wrote: post #88

Strongly agree with the original article, and it's fun to see all the niche use cases that people are mentioning here. But I have a major frustration with user scripts: writing them requires experience with Javascript and reverse engineering websites. This is fine for the HN crowd, but locks out most web users, who can't program at all. I bet that if it were slightly easier to develop user scripts, there'd be 10x as…

[deleted]
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