There are nearly 600 user scripts on the wiki. There were none in January, and about 80 in March.

This far outstrips FF extension creation (admittedly in a confined niche). Most of those scripts still work. I’m pretty confident that the popular ones all work.

APIs would be great. But solutions, today, are good too.

i think not. your objections are well founded, and absolutely have merit. i think it’s more a case that, on balance, the benefits outweigh the costs – particularly when you have a service provider willing to meet you halfway.

in short, it’s not that your objections are misguided. it’s that the benefits haven’t been made clear enough

Is its Google's perogative to sit down with GreaseMonkey developers and talk about what they can do to make the effects minimal? Heck no. As for minor changes, they shouldn't have to make an update about how they tweaked a div here or there or made a small javascript function change. That's serious work to track all of those changes and make announcements and stuff.

I dunno, I just don't think it should be Google's job to make sure that the various hacks people develop keep working.

Heck, maybe it would be a good idea to add official APIs for all the different Google Branded Services.

PS: I think "zero legitimate reason" came off a little harsh. I just meant in terms of, do they have an actual responsibility to do this.

I can’t imagine a notice like:

“Dear developers of unsupported third party tools,

Please be aware that we are changing our DOM model next week, so your ad strippers will no longer work. Please consider updating your scripts.”

Google never claimed to support any of this stuff. That’s the bottom line here. Now I would be pissed if they said they would support an API and one day, out of the blue, they changed it without notifying developers.

Also as soon as Google starts posting notice about changes they are now “supporting” that functionality. They just bought into a lot of overhead. That’s not a decision to be taken lightly.

..So I’m having a really hard time finding fault with Google on this one.

i don’t follow here; what about posting a simple notice of a pending domain change is hard? why should your average script monkey expect that most basic communication?

I just don’t see HTML as a stable API, but if works for some people, more power to them, but I think it is pretty difficult to expect *any* sort of support for this type of thing, even domain name changes. A change is a change.

What causes problems is that these APIs are often neglected in a downward spiral. “No one’s using the API, let’s not pay any attention to it”, “Their API sucks it’s totally neglected and crap, I can’t build anything interesting on it”.

Even FireFox which is extension heaven, breaks mods with changes. There is no good solution to this, other than doing due diligence with respect to the developer community.

My FireFox GMail notifier (waste space in my crowded system tray? no thx) broke, which annoyed me. I do feel like GMail could have developed a real published API that wouldn’t require the Gmail notifier guys to be hacky and brittle.

And then the site developers make a trival change to the website and hours worth of work are down the drain.

Cool toy? Maybe. Something I would depend on in my daily workflow? no way.