A customer asked us to fix a problem: his wife’s PC is running Ubuntu Linux and she was not able to use the chat feature at the open university website. The chat worked in Internet Explorer but not in other browsers. Customer wanted to install VirtualBox on Ubuntu and run Windows XP with IE in it. In our opinion it looked like an overkill and we decided to tackle the problem differently. With the help of the Firebug and Javascript console in Firefox we found a bug on the chat page – the id attributes on some elements were missing and the Javascript code expected them. Internet Explorer simply ignored the error but other browsers stopped the script execution on it. At this time we did not know if it will be possible to contact website developers fast enough and we remembered the extremely powerful Firefox extension – Greasemonkey. It allows an on-the-fly in-browser page modification. The Greasemonkey script fixing the problem was a simplicity itself:
// ==UserScript==
// @name ChatFix
// @namespace http://phuket-data-wizards.com
// @include http://website/chat/*
// ==/UserScript==
var send1Link = document.getElementsByName('send1')[0];
send1Link.setAttribute('id', 'send1');
var send2Link = document.getElementsByName('send2')[0];
send2Link.setAttribute('id', 'send2');
At the end we managed to forward the bug report to the developers and they quickly fixed the problem at the source.