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I'm a heavy Firefox user with many add-ons. I also use some userscripts via Scriptish.

I found some Firefox extensions that offer both the userscript and add-on version like A Bit Better RTM.

Is it better to use the userscript version over the add-on version or vice-versa? I'm concerned about memory usage and performance.

slhck
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izazueta
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1 Answers1

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It depends on the addon, like billc.cn mentioned, but assuming that there is no advantage to using a addon (which is normally the case, and when it is not it requires code modifications that a user script author is unlikely to do in order to take advantage of the addon perks), then I would say using a regular user script (at least with Scriptish) is always faster, for the following reasons:

  1. User scripts are lazy loaded (in Scriptish), so they are not loaded until they are first needed. Also the resources are lazy loaded. So adding a user script won't effect your FF startup time as a addon would. You can also disable caching if you have a fast HD and want to save some memory (usually the case for mobile).
  2. If you have 2+ addons that you could have installed as user scripts then you are already asking your computer to duplicate functionality that it is already doing. Such as listening to page loads, and loading instructions/code. Also more HD space will be used, because each addon will have copies of the same code, which is built in to Scriptish.
  3. With Scriptish you can list globally excludes, user script specific excludes, and even disable/enable any protocol that you want to, which you won't be able to do with a addon, or if you could then you would have to do it for all addons individually, so what's the point?
  4. Sometimes the order in which user scripts are applied matters, and this can be managed by Scriptish using the @priority header, which a addon would not be able to use because it would not have any idea when it is doing a injection relative to the other addons making modifications to the page.
  5. A addon will need to be updated more often because it will need to ship the updates for code that is built in to Scriptish, and the updates for the addon itself. Whereas a user script only needs to send updates for the user script.

If I think of any more then I will add them to the list..

Community
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erikvold
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