Does the Mefi Navigator Greasemonkey script work in Opera?

September 3, 2007 9:50 AM

Does the Mefi Navigator Greasemonkey script work in Opera? I followed the instructions on this page and put the script (with the original name) in my userjs folder, but nothing happens. I checked that the correct userjs folder is specified in my site preferences. Does it work for anybody else?
posted by davar to MetaFilter-Related at 9:50 AM (5 comments total)

I don't know the answer to your main question, but did you check the special requirements for Greasemonkey scripts?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:52 AM on September 3, 2007

Hmm, good question. I've never used Opera, and haven't heard of anyone using Mefi Navigator with it.

I just installed Opera, and saved the script in a userjs directory. I found that the script initially runs OK — it does everything that the screenshot says it does. I needed to restart Opera to get this to happen.

But the problem comes when you click on the « and » arrows to move between users' comments, or click the ≡ icon: nothing happens. These links have event listeners attached which point to anonymous functions defined in the script, such as function() { m_list(this);} where m_list is defined in the GM script. My guess is that Opera doesn't like this for some reason.

Another possible cause of the problem is the JavaScript error you can see in the console — it can't append a "No other comments" node somewhere on the page, and that error might be causing problems somewhere else along the line.

Also, it seems to run quite slowly in Opera, unlike in Firefox, though this could be because Opera waits for lots of slow things to happen (like loading all the fmpub scripts/ads at the bottom of the page) before triggering the script.

If there's someone out there with Opera-specific Javascript knowledge who'd be interested in fixing the link problem and maybe working out how to trigger the script earlier in the page loading process, that would be awesome and I'd be happy to help them out with the internals of the script. It may well be as simple as just adding a script tag to the DOM and putting the m_prev, m_list and m_next functions in there, and linking the event listeners to the new functions. But I'm afraid I don't have the time to rework, and more importantly and time-consumingly maintain, the script by myself to work on a different platform from the one it was designed for.
posted by matthewr at 10:41 AM on September 3, 2007

Thanks for looking into it matthewr. The mefi-navigator is the only thing I miss from Firefox for my day-to-day webbrowsing. It would be great if some javascript-savvy Opera users showed up. If not, I may ask it in the Opera forums and see if they can help, but I figured I'd ask here first if anybody got it working already.

My Opera is terribly slow with javascript on Mefi in general. I have to turn off javascript when I am writing an askMe comment, because the live preview makes the textbox extremely sluggish. It drove me nuts before I thought of disabling javascript. Since I did not see any other complaints about that, I figured that was probably just my setup, but now I wonder if it is related.
posted by davar at 3:40 PM on September 3, 2007

I only now noticed that the highlighting of admins and thread-starters does work. That's still cool.
posted by davar at 4:03 PM on September 3, 2007

Hm. So, I have been hoping somebody else asked this question for ages. Really. Yesterday, I finally posted the question myself, and today Opera 9.5 Alpha gets released. Everything seems to work fine in this version. What a slick user interface it is now. I see it is even better than last year or so when I still used Firefox. Thanks matthewr!
posted by davar at 9:36 AM on September 4, 2007