Scriptish.org

Scriptish 0.1.8 Released!

2012-09-23T00:00:00-07:00

Scriptish 0.1.8 was uploaded to AMO today!

Changes

If you’d like to see a full feature list then you should check out the version history wiki page.

Fennec

Fennec has changed, the older version has been replaced by what we call now Native Fennec. So all of the old code, that had a few bugs, is no longer useful. So support for Fennec has been temporarily removed.

Firefox Sync

Thanks to Greg, it is now possible to have Scriptish preferences synced by Firefox Sync. This feature is opt-in, so you must use the Scriptish options window to enable it.

Issue Tracker

I’ve switched back to the Github issue tracker. Lighthouse has many advantages, but it wasn’t working out for this project, so it is no longer going to be used. So a few links within the add-on had to be updated.

Memory Leak

There was a memory leak in the last version when using GM_registerMenuCommand in a second window, such that if the second window was closed it would leak because of the associated menu command. So this was resolved.

Firefox 17 introduces a new Cu.nukeSandbox method which does what it says, so I am now using this when windows are destroyed.

Compatibility Updates

A few apis were breaking due to __exposedProps__. Also console.log/GM_log updates were made by Nils.

GM_safeHTMLParser

Greg added a new argument, aBaseURL, which allows authors to specify a base URL to be used when resolving partials.

Give Scriptify A Try

2012-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

Scriptify is a add-on created by Kris Maglione which allows users to easily package a user script in to a restartless add-on. The add-on works fine alongside Scriptish or Greasemonkey.

The add-ons which Scriptify creates can then be uploaded to AMO, where it can be reviewed. If you are familiar with the old user script compiler, which did something similiar, then you will want to defamiliarize yourself.

Big thanks to Kris for developing this add-on, it is a big step forward for the community!

Find Scriptify on AMO here.

Search Engine Manager

2012-01-03T00:00:00-08:00

Well I’ve been doing some work on some modules to help port Scriptish to use the add-on sdk, and I have finally got a extension to show off some of my work!

Search Engine Manager

The Search Engine Manager will display your installed search engines in the Extension Manager about:addons.

I wrote this extension for two reasons. First, I hate the existing manager for search engines, and the second reason was a simple one, I needed to test my addon provider jetpack module.

This new module will be used by Scriptish eventually to display user scripts in the Extension Manager, just as it always has; of course this module will need some more work to fully support Scriptish’s feature set, but it is a good step forward.

Please keep working on e10s Mozilla!

2011-11-21T00:00:00-08:00

Well it sounds like electrolysis (e10s) may be going by the wayside in Fennec 12, and never make it in to Firefox after all of those firefox developers telling addon developers to write e10s friendly code, and even forcing us to implement it in order to adopt Fennec. Which I happily did not long ago.

Now addon developers are being told that better performance gains can be had by focusing efforts in other directions (and that is probably the case), so e10s may be at best, put on hold.

So I’d like to make a plea for electrolysis; performance wasn’t the only benefit as I recall, security was a benefit, and the ability to kill long running processes was another, and I do want those benefits!

I want control even more than some performance gains.

If you agree then please make some noise.

Moving Scriptish 2 Addon SDK

2011-11-21T00:00:00-08:00

I should have done this a long time ago, because the advantages are so great, such as writing code that others can reuse for their addons, security!, and much greater operability.

I created a userscripts package a while back, which was a good start, but there is a long ways to go still!

I will be reporting on my progress.

Using Userscripts.org Icon Everywhere for Scriptish

2011-09-27T00:00:00-07:00

I found a neat userstyle that will use the Userscripts.org (USO) icon instead of the Scriptish icon for the toolbar button and in a few other places (almost everywhere the Scriptish icon is used). I figure that some users will like this because I had a few requests for a icon that would look better with a black background for the addon bar.

So check this userstyle out!

Scriptish 0.1.5 Released!

2011-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

Scriptish 0.1.5 was released on AMO today!

Changes

If you’d like to see a full feature list then you should check out the version history wiki page.

Supporting Fennec

The biggest change is that this release is the first to support Fennec, which is the mobile version of Firefox for Android. So you can now user script the mobile web!

I spent a lot of time over the last month or so getting this out there for you all, so I do hope that you enjoy it! but sadly I did not implement everything that I wanted, and a crucial feature is still missing, which is user scripts updates. So needless to say I will be working hard on that one for a coming release, I promise!

Scratchpad Integration

Greg Parris has been putting in a bunch of work integrating Scriptish with Scratchpad, which I think is a excellent idea, and I have been really enjoying seeing this work progress. At the moment a user can save a Scratchpad as a user script, or use the Scratchpad as a user script editor, which is awesome because you can easily test parts of your script against a content document with Scratchpad!

In the next release I plan to have added a user script context to Scratchpad so that one can easily test the parts of their user script that use the Greasemonkey (aka GM_) api which Scriptish implements.

So big thanks to Greg for his work on this!

Issue Tracker Moved to Lighthouse

2011-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

I decided to move the issues tracker for Scriptish from Github to Lighthouse.

The Github API is fantastic I have to say, and I was able to easily export the issues, and it would be a simple task to import the issues back into Github (authorship would be lost, but it could be maintained either by obtaining the req’d authorization info or adding text to the body of a comment/issue mentioning the original author). However, there are also many problems that I have with the Github issue tracker, and most of them boil down to being about either missing features or broken features.

So, I decided to make the switch to Lighthouse, and to demonstrate why I think it is the better issue tracker, here are some features that Lighthouse has which Github issues do not (which cannot be said vice versa):

A feed.
Pages for the issue tracker.
Priority property for issues.
Default text for issues (which greatly improves the quality of bug reports!).
Tag cloud.
Better search and filters.
More states than just ‘open’ and ‘closed’.
I can create a separate issue tracker for the block list.

So if you are looking for the new issue tracker, then you can find it here: Scriptish Issue Tracker

Scriptish Supports Fennec!

2011-09-05T00:00:00-07:00

Well I don’t know about you, but ever since I got a Android with Fennec installed I’ve been itching to have user scripts on my cell phone like a fiend, so the last couple of weeks I devoted all of my free time (that I didn’t spend playing Halo) working on getting Scriptish to support Fennec. Now I can finally say that Scriptish 0.1.5 supports Fennec!!

The main challenge supporting Fennec was that it uses e10s which didn’t have much useful documentation I found, so I had to find some time to build example addons to try out what was possible. I’ll probably write some tutorials on my blog in the near future if you are interested in that sort of thing.

Scriptish 0.1.5 was just uploaded to AMO, so it should be reviewed within a week or so.

I hope you enjoy user scripting the mobile web!

How-to Detect Greasemonkey

2011-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

If you are a Greasemonkey user, then you may be surprised to know that Greasemonkey is informing every page that you visit that you are a Greasemonkey user.

Since Greasemonkey is a add-on that not every Firefox user has installed, that is personally identifiable information, and a potential security risk, so that is why Scriptish was made to be completely stealth.

Anyhow, if you are curious how to detect Greasemonkey as a webdev, well here’s how you do it:

Option 1

if (Components.interfaces.gmIGreasemonkeyService) {
  alert("I smell a monkey!");
}

Option 2

<script type="text/javascript" src="resource://greasemonkey/addons4.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof GM_addonsStartup !== "undefined") {
  alert("I smell a monkey!");
}
</script>