Gmail/Greasemonkey API issue

Posted by Dan Pupius, Gmail engineer

First off, this update is only for those of you who write or run Greasemonkey scripts. If you don't have any third-party extensions installed or don't know what we're talking about, you can ignore this post.

Ok... looks like some of you are still reading.

We recently pushed a change so Gmail Javascript now loads in an iframe. The Greasemonkey bindings we expose still work as described in the Gmail/Greasemonkey API; however, there may be a side effect to how some scripts work. Since the "gmonkey" object is now loaded in the context of the JS frame, "window" in the Greasemonkey script is now a reference to the JS frame and not the main window. Some scripts depended on this behavior to modify aspects of the page without going through our APIs.

If you're the author of a Gmail Greasemonkey script, you should be able to work around the update by changing the window object used -- Mihai P. posted an update to his Macros script on Friday. If you are accessing the "gmonkey" object via a different mechanism, then you can reference it using top.js.gmonkey for now, and an update will be pushed this week that creates an alias in the main window's context.