Troubleshooting 0.6.4

I thought it'd be useful to pull together all the issues you might run into with Greasemonkey itself.

We are, of course, trying to make Greasemonkey suck less, but this should help for now. Please be sure to read the error message closely so you can follow the appropriate actions for a workaround. Lots of Firefox errors look pretty similar.

Also, be sure to close Firefox and back up your profile before changing any files in your profile directory. Don't say we didn't warn you. ;)

• If you see an error including text like this: "(NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND) location JS frame :: chrome://greasemonkey/content/utils.js :: getContents ", follow the, uh, following steps. Updated to clarify command-line stuff: These are commands which need to be entered either in a DOS prompt or a terminal. On Windows, you can generally access this with "Start > Run > Cmd" or "Start > Run > command" or "Windows + R > command". (If someone can verify the steps for WinXP, it'd help; I don't have that OS.) On OS X, you can get there with Terminal (Applications > Terminal). On Linux, you should know how to find a terminal. ;) Once at a command prompt (C:\ in Windows, ~/user in OS X), enter the following commands, which just creates a gm_scripts directory and an empty file named config.xml in the appropriate place in your Firefox profile.
  
  
  
  1. cd your profile directory
     
  2. mkdir gm_scripts
     
  3. On OS X: touch gm_scripts/config.xml
     
  4. On Windows: echo "" > gm_scripts\config.xml
     
  
  
• If you see an error including text like this: "(NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIURI.host]", you're probably installing from a data: URL. If so, follow these steps:
  
  
  
  1. Open the link in your browser.
     
  2. Save the file locally, naming it [something].user.js.
     
  3. Open the local file in your browser.
     
  4. Install from the local file.
     
  
  
• If you see an error as a result of a Greasemonkey action (such as installing a script) which lists a chrome URL that starts with something other than chrome://greasemonkey (such as chrome://w3rted/content/browser.xul), you probably have a naming conflict. Follow these steps:
  
  
  
  1. Open your profile directory\extensions\Extensions.rdf.
     
  2. Find the extension is in conflict by searching for the first part of the chrome URL in your error message. In the example above, I'd search for "chrome://w3rted".
     
  3. Find the name of that extension by looking for the value of <em:name> in the same RDF:Description.
     
  4. Try moving the conflicting extension below Greasemonkey by using [Tools > Extensions, right-click, Move Down]. Doing this affects the order in which extensions are loaded and sometimes allows Greasemonkey to initialize successfully. Restart Firefox before testing again.
     
  5. If moving the extension down didn't resolve the issue, and you can live without the other extension, disabling it should work. [Tools > Extensions, right-click, Disable]. ... And restart Firefox again.
     
  
  

If you're getting one of these errors and these steps didn't resolve, let me know in the comments. If you're getting a different error, I need to add it to the list. I hope this helps get you monkeying again.

Workarounds for missing XMLHttpRequest, DOMParser, and XMLSerializer

Update: Over on the Greasemonkey mailing list, Joe la Poutre notices an even easier workaround. All you have to do is use the older form of the XPCNativeWrapper constructor to access a specific property. I'm not even sure why this works, but it does:

var parser = new XPCNativeWrapper(window, "DOMParser").DOMParser();
alert(parser.parseFromString("", "text/xml"));

Leaving the below, just for posterity...

---

One bittersweet part about releasing Greasemonkey 0.6.4 was that I needed to remove support for the XML Extras module which contains such goodies as XMLHttpRequest, DOMParser, and XMLSerializer.

I knew that many people were using XMLHttpRequest, particularly since GM_xmlhttpRequest, it's cross-domain replacement evaporated temporarily in 0.3.5, and that this would be a pain point. However, when weighing those people having to change their scripts to use GM_xmlhttpRequest and the alternative of having a confusingly inconsistent security model, I chose the former. I also fixed the major scripts I knew of, such as GMail Conversation Preview, which used XMLHttpRequest.

What I didn't expect at all was that people would miss DOMParser and XMLSerializer. I had no idea any scripts even used these. It's really neat to find people using pieces of your tool which you didn't expect them to, in ways you didn't expect them to. This makes me incredibly happy. Go user scripters! :-)

Anyway, to make a long story short, I've received many questions asking how to work around the lack of these two classes. The good news is that not only is there a workaround, there are three of them!

1. Use unsafeWindow.DOMParser and unsafeWindow.XMLSerializer

The downside here is that, as the name says, unsafeWindow is a reference to the content actual window - the same one that the content's JavaScript uses. Because of that, calling into it can make your script vulnerable to interference by the content script. This can be OK if you trust the site you are scripting somewhat. Take a look at the unsafeWindow details to decide whether you think this is appropriate for your script.

2. Use E4X

In a very zen turn of events it turns out that although Firefox 1.5 denies user scripters the XPCOM-based XML parsing and serializing they were accustomed to, it provides them with a brand-new - arguably superior - interface.

E4X is a brand new native JavaScript XML API that ships with Firefox 1.5 and is available to Greasemonkey scripts. There's not a ton of documentation yet, but from my experience with it so far, it's vastly more elegant and pleasant to work with than the DOM interfaces.

You can get more information about E4X, including the ECMA specification and a handy expression tester, at these URLs:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/E4X
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-357.htm
http://www.linkwerk.com/pub/javascript/e4x/e4x-tester/

One caveat to keep in mind is that, in accordance with the E4X spec (don't ask me, it's insane), the input XML must not have an XML declaration. So you usually need to use a regex to strip it before parsing. For example:

var xml = new XML(xmlStringWithDecl.replace(/<\?xml.*?\?>/g, ""));

3. Use an IFRAME and let Mozilla do the dirty work

Many have pointed out that Mozilla already ships with an excellent, and very robust XML parser. It also ships with an HTML parser. Why not just leverage those? You can, it just takes a bit of hacking. I put an example of how to use an IFRAME to parse an HTML document into a DOM on my website.

Greasemonkey HTML Parser

Of course, just by changing the content type from text/html to text/xml, you could use the same technique to parse XHTML or even raw XML.


So I hope this shows that although the way to do certain things has changed, no capabilities have been removed from Greasemonkey. In fact new ones have been added, and the addition of completely isolating user scripts from content improved the reliability and security of Greasemonkey quite a lot.

Sorry for the disturbance, you may now resume your madcap exploration and use of Greasemonkey for all manner of things I never expected.

Mozdev back - Greasemonkey page updated

After some downtime due to increased load from the Firefox 1.5 release, mozdev is back. I took the opportunity to update the Greasemonkey homepage and authoring page.

Slides from Nov 8 Emerging Technology SIG

Last month I was asked to give a presentation about Greasemonkey at the Emerging Technology SIG here in Mountain View. I was bored with my old presentation format, so I redesigned it.

View the slides.

And here's the zipped package if you want to use the format for your own presentation.

The old format also had some issues. I found that personally, the more words that were on each slide, the more I was obligated to say on each slide. It made me uncomfortable, knowing that people would see if I didn't say something I had planned to.

My girlfriend, Susan, mentioned that I actually speak about Greasemonkey quite well off the cuff. So I stole an idea from other presentations I've seen and put very few words on each slide. I felt like this gave me more freedom to just talk - expanding on areas people seemed interested in, and skipping areas they didn't.

There is only a very vague structure to this presentation. It's divided into several high-level sections, and each section progresses through a few phases:

• Question
• Exploration, broad answers, more questions
  
• Restate Question
• Concise answer
  

I don't know if this is applicable to other presentations, but it seemed to work for Greasemonkey. Maybe Greasemonkey just has a lot of questions surrounding it :-).

Broken Scripts Fixed

In abscense of the wiki-like features that Jesse is building into userscripts.org, I am keeping a list of scripts I have fixed for 0.6.4 at http://userscripts.org/fixes. I'll also post a comment on the userscripts.org page for the scripts when I make these changes.

I'll keep the script there until the author updates the original location and pings me. If you're having trouble with a script, send a mail to the mailing list, or leave a comment, and maybe I'll take a look.