June 8, 2005
@ 02:09 PM
Comments [4]
Turnabout - Greasemonkey for Internet Explorer (Yep, It's Another One)

If you are a geek, you may have heard of the Firefox extension called GreaseMonkey which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its design or behavior. This basically enables you to remix the Web and either add features to your favorite web sites or fix broken UI design.

Earlier this week, there was a post to the Greasemonkey mailing list pointing out the existence of Turnabout. Below are some excerpts from the Turnabout website.  

What is Turnabout?

Turnabout is an Internet Explorer plugin that runs user scripts of your choice on any website. User scripts are like plugins for websites. They can enhance your web experience in a lot of ways:

  • Block pop-ups
  • Change text URLs into clickable links
  • Add features, like adding custom search links in your Gmail account
  • Enlarge text fields that are too small
  • …And more!

Essentially, Turnabout does for IE what Greasemonkey does for Firefox .

So where does this leave the other recently announced Greasemonkey for Internet Explorer project, Trixie? Turnabout seems like a better bet for a couple of reasons. First of all, Turnabout doesn't require the .NET Framework like Trixie does. Secondly, Turnabout comes with source code but not with any licensing information which means it is not Open Source. Although Trixie's source code can be easily deciphered with Reflector, that technically is reverse engineering. Finally and most importantly, the developer of Trixie has stopped work on it now that Turnabout exists.

For now I'll be uninstalling Trixe and trying out Turnabout. I'm glad to see that Trixe inspired an even better project to get launched. REMIX the Web. 


 

Categories: Technology
Tracked by:
"Turnabout - Greasemonkey for Internet Explorer (Yep, It's Another One) " (Meril... [Trackback]
« The Lessons of AJAX: Will History Repeat... | Home | .NET vs. J2EE Performance Benchmarks for... »
Wednesday, 08 June 2005 18:30:09 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
This makes me wonder if getting general products/plugins, that rely on the .net framework, out to the masses just doesn't have the steam that MS wishes. I know that there is definitely a place for .net apps, but this post sort of sums up things from an end user perspective.
Jim Geurts
Friday, 10 June 2005 06:02:50 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I'm curious abotu how you intended this:

> Secondly, Turnabout comes with source code but not with
> any licensing information which means it is not Open
> Source.

to be read

I see two possible interpretations:

* As turnabout comes with no licencing information, it is not open source (and thus it's a better bet than the open-source trixie)

Or

* As turnabout contains no restrictive licencing information, it's open source (and thus it's a better bet than the closed-source trixie)

I'm confused as to which you mean though.. possibly I should just go look at the two projects and figure it out..

(Also, whatever backend you have running doesn't like <cite> tags - it threw an error about them being "potentially dangerous" *sigh*)
Zhasper
Friday, 10 June 2005 09:34:04 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Stupid question: does Turnabout (or Greasemonkey or Trixie for that matter) let you grab data out of password fields?

Because if so...that could be a problem.
ucblockhead
Friday, 10 June 2005 15:33:13 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
ucblockhead,
All Greasemonkey and its various kin do is inject Javascript into the page. So they can do anything that can be done with Javascript on that webpage. So the question then is whether Javascript gives you access to password fields on a webpage as oart of the DOM.
kpako@yahoo.com (Dare Obasanjo)
Comments are closed.