grease monkey
Post on 02-Jul-2015
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Grease Monkey
Interactive Media Device
By Jessica Brown
What is it?
• Grease monkey is an extension of Mozilla Firefox that allows users to install scripts when they are needed to most HTML Web pages.
• Examples:
• Fixing or rendering bugs
• Combining data from multiple Web pages
Details
• Grease monkey user scripts are written by hand using a JavaScript code which manipulates contents of Web page using the Document Object Model Interface.
• Userscript.org maintains a database of Grease monkey scripts, and for each one it lists the URLs of web pages to which the scripts pertain.
More Details
• Writing a Grease monkey script is similar to writing JavaScript for a web page, with some additional restrictions imposed by the security provisions of Mozilla's XPCNativeWrappers.
• In addition to JavaScript code, Grease monkey scripts contain limited optional metadata, which specifies the name of the script, a description, a namespace URL used to differentiate identically named scripts, and URL patterns for which the script is intended to be invoked or not.
Typical Grease Monkey Scripts
• Auto fill forms.
• Alter the formatting of text, borders, graphics, etc.
• Remove specific content, such as advertising, pop-ups, even whole sections of a page.
• Alter content and layout beyond what the page author considered.
More Scripts
• Add links, buttons, or any other type of HTML element anywhere on the page.
• Enhance the content of pages by correlating information from related pages on the same site, or other sites.
• Add extended JavaScript behavior to pages.
Problems
• Possible disruption to revenue of some Websites.
• Increases in the Web traffic that arise from some scripts.
• The proliferation of scripts acting on many pages and the difficulty of distinguishing whether problems in a page are caused by actual Web-programming bugs or by local Grease monkey scripts, may make troubleshooting defects more difficult.
More Problems
• Script errors resulting from lack of coordination between Grease monkey developers and the original Website developers.
• Grease monkey only works on HTML-based pages, and does not work on Java, Flash, Flex, and Silver light content within Web pages.
• Rich Internet Applications are more difficult for a Grease monkey script developer to control than static Web pages.
• The original site developers can release a new version of the site that causes the Grease monkey script designed for that site to stop working.
• There is no official way for user scripts to update themselves; some developers added such functionality to their user scripts but most of them remain static and eventually break.
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