Chickenfoot: Educationally great but practically useless

I recently installed and started using Chickenfoot, a Firefox extension which lets the user write simple scripts that are executed on webapages. The scripts can be triggered automatically or run manually. Either way they manipulate the webpage after it loads.

Chickenfoot is similar to Greasemonkey except that Greasemonkey forces you to use properly formed Javascript and to actually understand the elements of the DOM to manipulate the page while Chickenfoot helps you along. It comes out of an MIT research project on Computer-Human Interaction so it recognizes common form elements and provides shortcut commands to manipulate them.

I really like the tool but purely from the learning perspective – I want to learn some programming skills but find jumping straight into a programming book to be daunting. Chickenfoot provides a nice environment to get started in and a simplified language so you do real things almost immediately. You can, also, mix the simplified Chickenfoot commands with proper Javascript to write more powerful scripts. This ability provides the user a natural way to expand his knowledge at a natural rate.

As a tool, I guess there is a place for in-browser automation but chickenfoot runs too slowly for most serious purposes. It came from education and that is the market it best serves.