Grease Monkey

1. Grease Monkey
Interactive Media Device
By Jessica Brown

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.