Greasemonkey "0.8.2" Released

The latest version of Greasemonkey, "0.8.2" (full version: 0.8.20090920.2) has been uploaded to AMO. It includes the following changes:

• Do not inject scripts into file: and about: URLs by default, for security reasons. (#1000)
• The GM_openInTab() function respects the background loading tab behavior from Firefox preferences. (#1003)
• Specify label/control associations in "New Script" dialog, for accessibility. (#1010)
• Minor code clean ups and improvements. (#1011, #1020)
• Remove "forced" upgrade code. (#1013)
• Remove extra spacing around the status bar icon. (#1014)
• When adding include/exclude rules, include the port number in the default suggestion. (#1015)
• Reduce noise logged to the console when interacting with Firebug. (#1018)
• Apply security checks to GM_listValues() and GM_deleteValue(). (#1019)
• Fix missing localized strings in various locales. (#1022)
• Grease pages loaded into the sidebar. (#1023)
• Allow user scripts to access the latest available JavaScript engine. (#1026)

This is the same file posted as RC2 about a week ago to the -users mailing list. As the version number (and the release notes) indicate, this is a maintenance release, fixing bugs and adding minor features to the previous release.

Who Uses Greasemonkey, Part 2

I'd like to follow up my earlier post, analyzing which browsers Greasemonkey is used in. This time, a view on the operating systems where Greasemonkey is used. This is generally less interesting information -- it closely mirrors the market share of the OSes. But it's one more bit of detail we can derive from the AMO stats.

This graph probably isn't very surprising. It shows that Mac has become more popular in the last year. Some detail on the last four weeks:

Another view on the same detail. The exact underlying numbers involved:

OS	Users	Percent
Windows	2531829	91.50%
Mac	164282	5.94%
Linux	69186	2.50%
Other	1690	0.06%

Like I said at the beginning, generally the breakdown of the operating systems in general. Even so, the eight or nine percent of users on Mac or Linux make up nearly a quarter of a million users.

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Like before, the numbers and charts are visible on Google Docs. No script this time, the work was easy enough to do by hand.

Who Uses Greasemonkey?

As Johan and I begin to take over development of Greasemonkey, one of the important questions we need to answer is: which platforms should we support? We can inform this decision with some of the usage statistics that Mozilla Add-Ons gathers.

The statistics page for Greasemonkey is visible to everyone. The raw data is even available for download. But it can be hard to read, due to the level of detail and formatting that is applied. So, I've taken the time to analyze it carefully. The first interesting thing that we can see is the usage trends over time:

(Looks like Mozilla had a reporting issue around May of 2009.)

I've also made a pie-graph of app usage, for the average values of the past 4 weeks:

That pie chart represents these numbers:

App	Users	Percent
Firefox/<=1.0	598	0.02%
Firefox/1.5	5502	0.21%
Firefox/2.0	113921	4.31%
Firefox/3.0	1470584	55.70%
Firefox/>=3.5	1049092	39.74%
Other	446	0.02%

So, let's say first off: we know this is a bad measurement. There's (almost) no "other" because there's no official support for other platforms, so only third party alterations make this usage possible. Thus, this data doesn't help us answer (i.e.) "Should we support Flock?" or "Should we support SongBird?".

It does let us know a little bit about what versions of Firefox we should support. All of 1.0 and 1.5 make up only 0.23% of the user base. Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 make up 95.44% of the user base. Firefox 2, however, makes up 4.31% of the user base. That's a much harder call.

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Hackers: The raw data and charts behind this post is available on Google Docs. You can also see the python script that turned AMO's raw data into this presentation.