Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script.
Greasemonkey can be used for adding new functionality to web pages (for example, embedding price comparison in Amazon.com web pages), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple webpages, and numerous other purposes. Well-written Greasemonkey scripts can integrate changes so well that their additions appear to be natural parts of the web page.
Greasemonkey for Users
Firefox Required
Once you have the Greasemonkey addon installed, there's a heap of scripts that you can get to improve your daily web browsing experience.
- Get Greasemonkey Addon from Mozilla.
- Browse the directory of User Scripts.
- If you need help, read the Greasemonkey Manual
Some Good Scripts
I have found a few scripts that have proved to be quite useful:
- Google Reader - Colorful List View
- Colorizes the item headers in Google Reader list view
- Intercepter
- In twitter.com: replace short and meaningless tinyurls with the domain of the actual web site using tinyurls' preview feature.
- Twitter Hashtags
- Adds links to hashtags.org or twemes.com to tweets on twitter.com
Greasemonkey for Developers
You can use Greasemonkey to build your own personal scripts, or as an alternative to making a stand-alone plugin. If you already know Javscript and modifying the DOM tree, then writing your own scripts will be easy to do.
- Greasepot - the official blog and homepage for Greasemonkey.
- GreaseSpot Wiki is community documentation for user scripting with Greasemonkey.
- Get started with the Editing Scripts section of the manual, as well as the Greasemonkey API.
- There's also Dive Into Greasemonkey (rather old material).
My User Scripts
Here are a few user scripts that I have created:
- Twurl Link Info
- Shows information about all Twurls found on Twitter.
- Cleaner SquidU
- Tidies up the SquidU Forum interface, and adds highlighting.
Blog Posts from Greasespot
- Greasemonkey Version 0.8
- At long last, the new version of Greasemonkey is available. Get Greasemonkey 0.8.0 from addons.mozilla.org. The most important change for this release is full compatibility with Firefox 3.0. There is also a new feature that allows ...
- Greasemonkey Security Update
- I've just posted an update to Greasemonkey that fixes a recent publicly disclosed security issue. Please upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible. Note that this update might affect compatibility for a small number of scripts. ...
- Greasemonkey 0.7 Candidate
- Hello all, Since there were some pretty major problems with the last release that caused significant grief, I've rethought how releases will work. Going forward, we will:. Do candidate releases to greasemonkey-dev and greasemonkey-users ...
- Greasemonkey 0.6.9: gm_scripts directory bug gone forever?
- Download Greasemonkey 0.6.9 Anthony has made a change in this release which will hopefully end the issue which keeps popping up of the gm_scripts directory not existing. Other interesting bits in this release: ...
