On Feb 7, 2011, at 7:39 AM, GrayFace wrote:
What was the reason for the change?
I'm sure that the august Anthony Lieuallen (frequent contributor to this
list and quite possibly the World's Leading Authority on the inner
workings of GM's code) could answer this in more depth, but it appears
from my reading of the long, long history of this change over on the
greasemonkey-dev list[1] that there were several reasons for this
change:
-- The feature was all but unused by any but the most technical
users, who represent a tiny sliver of the overall GM user base.
(Comment: Technical users are the ones most likely to promote
GM and make it more useful by writing user scripts. I saw this
point mentioned once or twice in the gm-dev discussions of the
change, but it didn't carry the day.)
-- I gather that some sensed that the UI of GM was too complicated
for the majority of "casual" users.
(Comment: Those of us griping on gm-users about this lost feature
may disagree, but we didn't "vote" when this was being argued on
gm-dev. Apparently, "you snooze, you lose" is the order of the
day. Then again, I have contributed not a single line of code to
GM itself, and in the open source software world, only
committers get a vote. Users can go fish. If you _really want to
feel like a second class citizen, try complaining about some
lost feature in Google Chrome: those developers are openly
hostile to any and all user input.)
-- Other browsers' "GM-like" features (such as Google Chrome's
support for user scripts as a kind of "poor man's extension") do
not maintain a separate database of includes and excludes (as GM
has done 'til now, in the form of the config.xml file) but
require "technical" users who want to change which sites a
script addresses to find and modify the scripts themselves.
(Comment: For as long as I've used Chrome, I have found this to
be the most irritating feature of Chrome's User Script support.
When I decide to update a script, I have to remember to save the
header out of the old version, then install the new version,
then edit the new version, etc, etc, etc. Very, very weak. GM
was light-years ahead on this, and has now fallen back into the
middle of the pack, as far as I'm concerned.)
-- Maintaining a database (in the form of config.xml) of includes
and excludes that is separate from the scripts themselves is
considered to be some sort of "bad form".
(Comment: Mixed feelings about this one — keeping the data
separate from the script is a bit awkward, but it did insulate
users from script updates losing their customizations.)
I hope this helps. If I got it terribly wrong, I hope that someone who
knows the arguments better than I do will correct me.
1. http://groups.google.com/group/greasemonkey-dev
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