Trying to encourage people to enter into an endless game of Whac-A-Mole fixing and re-fixing browser extensions to work with sites as they update isn't a solution.
Who here is going to spend countless hours on that thankless task?
Sure it is. This is called adversarial interoperability and it is great:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...
People are going to fix bad websites whether or not their owners want them to. This is exactly how ad blockers work and they solve so many problems with the web it's not even funny. I've posted many times about how we should just stop trusting hostile website javascripts and start writing custom free software scrappers or clients for all of them. I suppose GNU had the same idea. Awesome!
> Who here is going to spend countless hours on that thankless task?
I spent quite some time writing my own JS code for my school's portal because the default site was unusably bad. The results were pretty good and lasted until months after my graduation. If everyone did this, the web would be fixed in no time.
Why should we allow companies and web developers to have the ultimate say in how their sites work? The javascript is running on our computers and we can totally replace it if we want. We are in control and it is time to start exercising this power.
they have forgotten the users demographic of free source consumers.
All GNU needs to make is a browser extension that collects custom javascripts for all kinds of sites. One person goes and fixes a popular site? All they need to do is contribute that to the GNU repository. The extension will automatically load the new code when users visit the site.
Eh, I assume a lot of people? That's basically what the entire open source space is about! (the person one, not the "corporate open source" that is gaining traction lately)
Don't forget that by "spending countless hours on a thankless task" is how we initially got tools like docker, ansible, bootstrap and more.
I agree with your first part though, that there is probably a better, more efficient solution that carries chance of more sustainable results.
I know this can be made to work - modding communities are a perfect example, you can have people dealing with crap and unexpected breakage on a timely basis and releasing trustworthy, high-value code for free. I just feel it didn't happen with userscripts for some reason.
Oh yes, I still run userscripts from time to time. I've started using JS bookmarks more and more though, to control the triggering of user JS code whenever I want, rather than having something to run on each page load.
But I think the new webextension stuff that Chrome initially released, and now supported by every major browser, ate the lunch of userscripts.
Yes: if FSF/GNU (or a similar organization in that orbit) ran their own repository of user scripts, in the vein of distros' package repos.
In cases like youtube-dl or gallery-dl this solution works.