Chickenfoot for Firefox: Rewrite the Web | Hacker News Reader

Chickenfoot for Firefox: Rewrite the Web

groups.csail.mit.edu

56 pointsnir18 comments

Sort of like GreaseMonkey, but in addition to pure JS adds a nice API for simple access to most common operations. Pretty neat.

One wonders though why they didn't implement it as a general js library that could also be used from gm.

You know, it's open source, you can just grab the code.

This situation is kinda the point of free software mate.

How does it compare in capabilities to Selenium?

One significant advantage that Selenium seems to have is that it accepts CSS3 selectors as target element patterns. Chickenfoot has XPath, but not CSS3. A bit of a bummer because this otherwise looks like it will be fun to play with.

I use Selenium regularly and while it is exceptionally useful, it's also quite buggy. I heard mumblings some time ago about Google contributing to the Selenium project or even forking it, but I'm not certain what's happened there.

I created the Selenium project 6 years ago. These days, I'm working on my own Selenium-based startup, Sauce Labs ( http://saucelabs.com ) -- We offer commercial support for Selenium and have a cloud-based web app testing service, too, called Sauce OnDemand.

Regarding Google, you might be thinking of the on-going merger between the Selenium and the WebDriver projects. WebDriver was created by Googler Simon Stewart. He currently works at Google, but WebDriver was created when Simon was still at ThoughtWorks. Also, I am a former Googler (and former ThoughtWorker), and worked on Selenium during my time at both places.

I worked as a developer on Chickenfoot for about 6 months going into my sophomore year at MIT. It does share a lot of similarities with GreaseMonkey, but I've found it to be a much more powerful tool for writing quick scripts to perform simple interactions with web sites. This is largely assisted by its API of commonly used operations (some of which I wrote).

The ability to quickly package your Chickenfoot scripts into Firefox extensions also holds a lot of value.

The ability to quickly package your Chickenfoot scripts into Firefox extensions also holds a lot of value

Definitely! I'm really interested in that feature - could you link to some docs of it? Couldn't find much on the site

This is pretty cool. I wish they had reused jQuery where possible, or layered on top of jQuery.

They'd need to sort this out before it can be widely recommended: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/chickenfoot/faq.html#xss

Is there a way to find the text you need to append after the # symbol (#xss) to get to a particular section without looking at the page source or using the TOC links?

Not in stock browsers. But if you are happy with a bookmarklet solution, see the 'named anchors' bookmarklet on this page:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html

I use the webdev toolbar addon for this: Information > Display Anchors.

Have barely tried anything with javascript. This instantly reminded me of the joy of the learning HTML in Mozilla back in the day. Will now, finally, be learning some javascript.

I have used it before now. I made it write the URL of the currentp age to a listener than processed it and sent back any js it decided to run (whcih sounds a bit inner platform but I had my reasons). It is a nifty little tool though I have a slight concern because it has had no updates since 2008 and looks like it might be an orphan.

Looks like there was a december 2009 release?

Ah, stupid me. I was going by the copyright notices. I was using it before Dec 2009 when I had my concerns.

Go Chickenfoot !

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