Question

I was looking at a greasemonkey script today trying to figure out why it wasn’t working any more. After playing around a while I realized it worked fine on firefox 3.6 but not on later versions like the current one (8).

After a bit of googling I landed here.

I’m not sure if I’m reading this correctly. WebSQL is being dropped from Firefox entirely because the standardization process has reached an “impasse”, because there is no alternative implementation except for SQLite? Does this mean greasemonkey scripts that rely on WebSQL require ff 3.6 to run properly?

I wonder how hard it might be to simply fork SQLite into NotSQLite and have the standardization process continue…

Answer 1

Firefox didn’t axe WebSQL by themselves; the W3C has declared it dead.

Note that Firefox still uses SQLite, which is not the same as WebSQL. However, a Greasemonkey script does not have direct access to SQLite directly.

You can use sessionStorage, localStorage, and/or globalStorage to persist values.

Or you can use IndexedDB which is the replacement for WebSQL.

Finally, for full-on SQL capabilities, there is the old standard of AJAXing data back and forth to your own server.

Obviously, it’s not a good idea to remain on FF 3.6, due to lack of ongoing support, and increasing certainty of security exploits.