Working on a Greasemonkey fork for Pale Moon

[back2themoon]

Quick question: Is there someone here that would hate my extension not being 100% faithful to how Greasemonkey should look and act like (Think of the current upstream version of Greasemonkey on Firefox), or do you guys just care about the extension being compatible and effective, no matter how different it'll look like in comparison to the old fork of Greasemonkey?

I doubt anyone here would prefer looks over compatibility and effectiveness! But hey, that's just my opinion.

...the old fork of the extension does not have the import/export mechanism...

If that "only" exports/import scripts, then I am not sure if it's really that important. Everything is neatly organized in gm_scripts and Pale Moon users I assume are familiar with profile backups.

Unless of course your intended changes replace the gm_scripts folder with a more advanced userscript storage system?

[sinfulosd]

A new version of Greasemonkey for UXP just got released - 3.6.0 is here!

Now uses a different UUID, as requested, which I finally get to have the freedom to put my own changes, instead of trying my hardest to mimick how the old fork would've been.

It fixed some bugs and introduces some features that should exist on it, since they also exist on all the other modern userscript managers, including the import/export feature.

You have to uninstall any old version of Greasemonkey that is 3.5.0 and below, in order to be able to use the latest version of 3.6.0

The full changelog and the latest extension can be found here

[back2themoon]

Great release and a significant step forward.

[athenian200]

Quick question: Is there someone here that would hate my extension not being 100% faithful to how Greasemonkey should look and act like (Think of the current upstream version of Greasemonkey on Firefox), or do you guys just care about the extension being compatible and effective, no matter how different it'll look like in comparison to the old fork of Greasemonkey (I call Janek's fork old now, since I maintain a modern fork of Greasemonkey)?

Hmm... well, where possible, would you mind trying to stick to words over icons, and windows with proper buttons that aren't too flat?

Like, I'm sure people will be happy to just have an updated extension, but people would be even happier if they get something that feels more like an XUL extension, rather than just an XUL port of a UI that seems like it would be more at home on a Chromium-based browser, since in some cases the UI is a part of what they are wanting to get away from.

I think most people would prefer to just try not to demand too much of you because they feel like getting a working extension is such a big win and they'd likely be willing to tolerate a Chrome-like UX if it's too much trouble to do something more traditional, so it falls more into the category of... just do your best knowing your audience and accommodating where you can, knowing people will understand where you can't.

I would generally think people care less about having the UI look exactly like another extension, and really just don't like the "mobile app feel" that WebExtensions usually have. From what I've seen of your extension, it is doing a good job so far and seems not to have gone in the "Chrome UX" direction. But for the most part you can likely do as you wish with the UI.

[moonbat]

If you ask me, there's no need to change anything about the old UI. The old extension only suffered from programmatic incompatibility with modern versions of userscripts; only that needs fixing so that scripts written for other *monkey managers can work here properly.

The other thing is as long as you use the same preferences hierarchy (extensions.greasemonkey.*) , settings from older versions will not be affected. As an example, my GetEmAll fork of the popular DownThemAll retains whatever settings and download history was there if you were using the XUL version of the latter, you just have to uninstall it and immediately install GetEmAll for it work seamlessly.

[Attronarch]

Thanks, replaced the old Greasemonkey add-on. All works well so far.

[sinfulosd]

A new version of Greasemonkey for UXP just got released - 3.6.1 is here!

A Bugfix-only release to address multiple bugs that the previous major release did not address, including 'GM_registerMenuCommand' not working properly, UUID changing in every .properties files, and the installation error of this userscript that was posted on the forum.

The full changelog and the extension release is here

Anyways, is my extension viable to be included in the official Pale Moon addons site?

[back2themoon]

Thanks for yet another fine update, sinfulosd.

Note that the Add-on Manager's "Check for Updates" is not currently detecting it. I have 3.6.0 installed.
Perhaps it's not "up" yet?

Anyways, is my extension viable to be included in the official Pale Moon addons site?

I don't see why it wouldn't. You still have to submit it though. I don't believe it's going to happen with forum posts.

[sinfulosd]

Note that the Add-on Manager's "Check for Updates" is not currently detecting it. I have 3.6.0 installed.

Yes, I leave the process of updating the "Update.rdf" file at the very last step, since I've once made the mistake of editing it a bit earlier than intended and it brought the phantom update bug to a lot of users. It should be automatically updating everyone's extension to the latest one now.

[UCyborg]

Ordering scripts can be clunky. If you want to move the script to specific place and have many scripts, you have to use move up / down option many times. And Add-ons manager UI is not the most responsive thing in the world + plus it may even be slower with CSS customizations. Depending on where you want to move it, opening script's settings in Tampermonkey and selecting the spot can be faster.

Tampermonkey displays more information about the scripts and its page is more dense with information, though I suppose density is on CSS hacks to the Add-ons manager.

[sinfulosd]

Ordering scripts can be clunky. If you want to move the script to specific place and have many scripts, you have to use move up / down option many times. And Add-ons manager UI is not the most responsive thing in the world + plus it may even be slower with CSS customizations. Depending on where you want to move it, opening script's settings in Tampermonkey and selecting the spot can be faster.

Tampermonkey displays more information about the scripts and its page is more dense with information, though I suppose density is on CSS hacks to the Add-ons manager.

I thought of adding "Settings" inside of every userscript, but that will be definitely taking a lot of effort, since I'll be editing the extension codebase core (Unless if I'll be getting the help of the AI, which it might not be 100% reliable, especially with the UI designing).

However, I already added the "contributing" file, telling people how they can contribute into the extension, which I'll definitely find it handy, since I have a full-day job.

[sinfulosd]

Currently testing the new redesign of the per-userscript options. I'm still refining some things, but I'm already planning to commit the changes, in case if anyone wants to build the extension by themselves and give me their feedback about it, before it gets released. The screenshot of the redesign can be seen here

It'll take a while for this version to be released. I hope everyone is as excited as me for the next version of 3.7.0 (Any bugs can be reported during that time and I'll make sure to fix them and release the fixes in an incremental release of 3.6.x, depending on the importance of that bug, of course).

[back2themoon]

Nice screenshot. You could consider releasing a beta (or alpha?) version for users to test more easily.

[frostknight]

It'll take a while for this version to be released. I hope everyone is as excited as me for the next version of 3.7.0 (Any bugs can be reported during that time and I'll make sure to fix them and release the fixes in an incremental release of 3.6.x, depending on the importance of that bug, of course).

Gotta say, so far so good, your changes for your fork.

[sinfulosd]

You could consider releasing a beta (or alpha?) version for users to test more easily.

Yeah, I was thinking of releasing a version of it and not have the update mechanism point to it, so that anyone who wants to try it, they could do it on their own, instead of being forced to download something that might be too buggy for their liking.

Gotta say, so far so good, your changes for your fork.

It's probably because I haven't made some significant changes to the extension yet, I just filled in some compatibility changes for the extension to work with all the other userscripts - even when I changed the UUID and added the import/export feature, It was inevitable for these 2 to happen anyways. Now, I'm working on redesigning some page interfaces that would, atleast be unfamiliar sight to a lot of users to the extension, that it would actually feel like you're using a brand new extension with the same purpose of being a userscript manager.

My changes are not deleting anything that used to exist (mainly because the extension is outdated, its missing out on features more than being in need of streamlining), It's adding options that (I believe) should exist in my modern fork, since these options also exist on the other userscript managers.

However, I'll be reading the feedback about my extension and see what's the response to the next version is going to be like.

[moonbat]

I've published the extension, it's available under 'Tools & utilities' on the addons site.

[sinfulosd]

I've published the extension, it's available under 'Tools & utilities' on the addons site.

Yaaaaaaay, finally the users will have much more confidence in trying out my extension and report the bugs that it might have, so that the debugging process gets to be a lot faster, thus making it a stable one, but with lot of features.

And also forever cementing my work on the official Pale Moon addons site, of course.

I'm still working on the redesign and it's already taking A LOT of work, it might even take months for it to land on everyone's browser.

I'm also experimenting with adding Live Search feature, but I'm already tackling with the redesign, among other things that I'm tackling with. I'm not being pessimistic, I'm just dealing with a lot of things with developing the extension (not to mention what I'm also dealing with, IRL), so don't expect the redesign to land anytime now.

[sinfulosd]

So, I'm currently working on:

• deleting 'framescript'/'messageManager' round-trip that is doing nothing on a single-process browser, replacing it with direct chrome-side injection (Unless if someone just decides to approach me and be like "Why did you delete that, I was making a fork of Pale Moon, but was about to introduce e10s into it and now your extension is unusuable in my browser").

• 'GM_util.getService()'-style indirection that exists only because Mozilla once threatened to take JSMs away - collapsing them to direct calls.

• XBL bindings that aren't load-bearing — convert to anonymous content + JS

And some Multi-process /e10s idioms surviving in places where they no longer matter.

I tried to avoid doing that, but the more I develop the extension, the more my code goes through friction with dirty code. It's inevitable for me to do something about it, and it'll definitely take a lot of time and effort in order to fix such thing.

I'm glad that the latest 3.6.1 is already stable and nobody reported any instability issues with it - this gives me so much room for me to stay off-grid and do nothing but streamlining my code and hopefully I get to fix some long-standing bugs that cannot be fixed by any other way except streamlining it.

So, the per-script option redesign update will be delayed for a bit, until I streamline the extension.

[UCyborg]

Old Greasemonkey for PM can get around site's CSP, the UXP version apparently cannot.

See https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=33408#p273639

A common issue with extensions from my experience.