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by jmadeano 211 days ago
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.
2 comments
arantius 211 days ago
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.

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bambax 211 days ago
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.

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