191–200 of 218 posts
Its a great idea, I'm cautious to install this because I don't know how to monetize this for the long haul. I'd love to hear your thoughts on local models vs something hosted for this.
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> bring back the Greasemonkey way of doing things Greasemonkey still works great, no?
It certainly may, I'm not sure. I think the ecosystem was at its apex when userscripts.org had a browseable library of scripts that even laypeople could install with a click. It was like a second ecosystem of browser extensions. My understanding is that it's a bit more of a fragmented ecosystem now but I could be wrong.
Part of the fragmentation (on the extension side at least) came from Manifest V3 which required a massive re-write of logic and introduced a lot of friction for userscript managers. Many projects just died or stayed in maintenance mode since it was a big undertaking. MV3 certainly has been a pain to work with on our side.
Its a great idea, I'm cautious to install this because I don't know how to monetize this for the long haul. I'd love to hear your thoughts on local models vs something hosted for this.
Especially with the permissions you necessarily grant to this extension! The easiest way to monetize this is to sell it to somebody who will exfiltrate all your banking data with an invisible auto-update.
In order for us to be able to execute your scripts that do powerful things (send notifications, save to local storage, download things, etc.), our extension needs to have those permissions itself. Google doesn't have any way for us to say our extension itself only requires permissions x, y, z but give this user script permissions j, k, l.
Your browsing/page data is yours. That data is only accessed when you explicitly request to generate a script (i.e. can't generate a script to modify a page without seeing that page).
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It certainly may, I'm not sure. I think the ecosystem was at its apex when userscripts.org had a browseable library of scripts that even laypeople could install with a click. It was like a second ecosystem of browser extensions. My understanding is that it's a bit more of a fragmented ecosystem now but I could be wrong.
I've also noticed the fragmentation of the ecosystem. There is still some powerful stuff out there, but it is hard to find and UX has a lot of room for improvement (especially for laypeople). Part of the fragmentation (on the extension side at least) came from Manifest V3 which required a massive re-write of logic and introduced a lot of friction for userscript managers. Many projects just died or stayed in maintenan…
Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> bring back the Greasemonkey way of doing things Greasemonkey still works great, no?
It certainly may, I'm not sure. I think the ecosystem was at its apex when userscripts.org had a browseable library of scripts that even laypeople could install with a click. It was like a second ecosystem of browser extensions. My understanding is that it's a bit more of a fragmented ecosystem now but I could be wrong.
I had basically this exact idea too a few months ago and at the time already found a few implementations attempting it. https://robomonkey.io/ being one example I found so didn't pursue it further. Also it turns out llm's are already very good at just generating Violentmonkey scripts for me with minimal prompting. They also are great for quickly generating full blown minimal extensions with something like WXT when yo…
> Also it turns out llm's are already very good at just generating Violentmonkey scripts for me with minimal prompting. They also are great for quickly generating full blown minimal extensions with something like WXT when you run into userscript limitations.
We've thought about full blown extensions and maybe we'll get there, but I'd wager that there is gap between users who would install/generate a userscript vs a full blown extension. Also a one-click install userscript is much simpler to share vs full chrome store submission/approval (the approval time has been a pain for many developers I've talked with). With that said, this is early days and we're still figuring out what people want.
> One angle I was/am considering that I think could be interesting would be truly private and personal recommendation systems using LLM's that build up personal context on your likes/dislikes and that you fully control and could own and steer. Ideally local inference and basically an algo that has zero outside business interests.
I've definitely considered the idea of your own personal, tunable recommendation system that follows you across the web. And I have some background there (worked on recommendations systems at Pinterest), but recommendation systems are very data hungry (unless we regress to the XGBoost days), and task of predicting will/won't the user like this image (binary) is vastly easier than operating over the entire page UI. Definitely not impossible, but we aren't there yet. For now, I just want to make it super easy for you to generate your own useful page mods
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It certainly may, I'm not sure. I think the ecosystem was at its apex when userscripts.org had a browseable library of scripts that even laypeople could install with a click. It was like a second ecosystem of browser extensions. My understanding is that it's a bit more of a fragmented ecosystem now but I could be wrong.
I've also noticed the fragmentation of the ecosystem. There is still some powerful stuff out there, but it is hard to find and UX has a lot of room for improvement (especially for laypeople). Part of the fragmentation (on the extension side at least) came from Manifest V3 which required a massive re-write of logic and introduced a lot of friction for userscript managers. Many projects just died or stayed in maintenan…
I have a couple of (personal) scripts on Tampermonkey that work ok in Firefox and Chrome, though.
The extension I've always wanted is a one that makes every link to a modern story on the New York Times, CNN, ESPN, etc. load using their same websites from like 2004. https://web.archive.org/web/20041207071752/http://www.cnn.co... Make every new page I load look like this, or a slightly cleaned up or mobile-specific version.
We don't currently have a way to provide a reference during generation, but if I were you, I'd personally try downloading the old page archive and a new page archive, throw them both in codex/claude code as context and see what it can come up with. Wouldn't be surprised if it could do a decent job writing a converter.
Somewhat tangential: I have had luck with more generic retheming, e.g. "Turn Google into a 1970s era CLI " (https://www.tweeks.io/share/script/8c8c0953f6984163922c4da7) or "Turn LinkedIn into a 90s era Neocities site" These aren't the most useful, but they are fun!
>YC
>look inside
>ai slop
lol called it from the first line
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It certainly may, I'm not sure. I think the ecosystem was at its apex when userscripts.org had a browseable library of scripts that even laypeople could install with a click. It was like a second ecosystem of browser extensions. My understanding is that it's a bit more of a fragmented ecosystem now but I could be wrong.
IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.
And that isn't even to mention all the guardrails the sites put in place today: content security policies, untrusted html, dynamic refreshing, etc.