Greasemonkey Hacks

Hack #59. Use Recent Searches and Google SearchKeys Together

Recent Searches needs an update to play nicely with Google SearchKeys.

I stumbled onto this hack by accident. I had been running Recent Searches [Hack #57] for a few weeks, and I heard about Google SearchKeys [Hack #58] on the Greasemonkey mailing list. I went to install it and immediately fell in love with it, but after a few searches, I realized that my recent searches list wasn't being updated anymore.

After investigating, I discovered that, because of the way the Google SearchKeys user script works, it was never calling the onclick handler I Had defined for the search result links. Instead, Google SearchKeys simply parsed out the URL of each search result link and assigned it to window.location.href, thus loading the result page and creating the illusion of "following" the link. The illusion was almost perfect, except that my Recent Searches script was assuming that the only way to follow a result link was to click it (or navigate to it with the keyboard and press Enter, but either way would trigger the link's onclick handler).

After a little intensive research, I had a solution so ingenious that my editor agreed it was worthy of its own hack. JavaScript has a feature called watchpoints. On every object, you can set a watchpoint on one of the object's properties. When that property is about to be changed, the JavaScript engine will call a callback function of your choosing, with the property name, the old value, ...