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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

Looks great, and a brilliant idea to bring back the Greasemonkey way of doing things. Also, perhaps the first practical use case for LLM-In-The-Browser I've seen in the wild (sidebars or AI startpages are very half-posterier'd ideas for what AI in the browser should mean imo).

Like some others here, Firefox is my daily driver and would look forward to anything you could bring our way.

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Thanks! I've tried my share of Agentic Browsers, sidebars, etc. Most of them don't work that well, and even as they get better, I am just generally not sold on the vision. Sure, there are some amount of "chores" that I need to do on the web that I wouldn't mind automating/offloading, but I also genuinely enjoying browsing the web. I don't want a future where AI agents do all the browsing for us.

So we built this to hopefully make browsing the web more enjoyable for us humans that remain :)

And I'm with you on Firefox. I'd love to be able to go back to Firefox as my daily driver. Will try to prioritize it!

> bring back the Greasemonkey way of doing things

Greasemonkey still works great, no?

It certainly may, I'm not sure. I think the ecosystem was at its apex when userscripts.org had a browseable library of scripts that even laypeople could install with a click. It was like a second ecosystem of browser extensions.

My understanding is that it's a bit more of a fragmented ecosystem now but I could be wrong.

I've also noticed the fragmentation of the ecosystem. There is still some powerful stuff out there, but it is hard to find and UX has a lot of room for improvement (especially for laypeople).

Part of the fragmentation (on the extension side at least) came from Manifest V3 which required a massive re-write of logic and introduced a lot of friction for userscript managers. Many projects just died or stayed in maintenance mode since it was a big undertaking. MV3 certainly has been a pain to work with on our side.

For Greasemonkey proper (which has always only been a Firefox extension) the big pain point was Mozilla's forced migration to new extension APIs (2015: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... ). This required a major rewrite, taking over a year, and not to add new features but rather just to not bit rot away. Then what felt like right after that, they completely deprecated classic extensions, forcing only web extensions (2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef... ). This required an even more thorough rewrite again, and made it not difficult but actually impossible to keep all functionality.

Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.

Yeah, I had a semi-popular extension on MV2 that I didn't migrate to MV3 and let die -- not worth the hassle IMHO, and I didn't want to be part of that move anyway, which was as user-hostile as they come (all in the name of "security", of course).

I have a couple of (personal) scripts on Tampermonkey that work ok in Firefox and Chrome, though.

IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.

While building this, we've had to do a lot of debugging. You think "Hey, this is a pretty simple request, why did it fail?" Then you actually dig into the archive that is 98 files of HTML, JS, and CSS, inlined and minified with obscure variable names and no comments. Thankfully many sites do still have relatively stable selectors + aria labels, but I am honestly amazed everyday at how well some of this stuff manages to works.

And that isn't even to mention all the guardrails the sites put in place today: content security policies, untrusted html, dynamic refreshing, etc.

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