[perpil]

Tampermonkey isn't better than using a Chrome extension, but it's less friction for a developer to build and distribute a cross browser script. If they build it as an extension, they need to target multiple browsers and get it deployed to the Firefox/Chrome web store.

[moritzwarhier]

If you can read JS and the user script is not huge, I think it makes a huge difference.

Apart from that, there are APIs exclusive to extensions, e.g. instrumenting client-side communication among tabs with different origins, listing all tabs, basically accessing a special API that sits on a higher-level context, and, while gating certain functionality behind user approval, and forbidding other functionality completely (at least in Manifest 3.0), extensions with the corresponding permissions can do more than a script running in the page context. They can inject these as well, though, even overriding CSP sometimes, as far as I know?

The main problem with these permissions, and WebExtension 3.0 partly was an attempt to improve this, or at least claims it: most people give a second of doubt at best when installing an extension, as long as they think it comes from a trusted source.

[grimgrin]

I love userscripts. Aren't we all using https://github.com/violentmonkey/violentmonkey now though?

thought I realize "if it works it works", https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey

[adrianwaj]

I did something similar 2 days ago with ViolentMonkey if you only want to check high-level discussion without any new tabs at all.

https://greasyfork.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/sokzpb2ztmatlh... (screenshot)

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/588721-hacker-news-comment...

I'd improve it by counting top level comments next to items but that would slow it down. Still need to make some slight changes like closing sidebar by re-clicking orange (beyond just right-clicking sidebar.)

It's very fast and speeds up thinking overall.

[Barbing]

Not on Safari, but I should migrate on Firefox I’ve read (some controversy).

  zip is available only if you're logged-in on GitHub site

Haven’t seen that before.

[ta8903]

Userscripts are also less friction for the user. At least for some level of triviality.

I would say only go for extensions over userscript if you need a settings menu (or any of the APIs the sibling comment mentions).