Filed under: Developer, Internet, Windows, Productivity, Web services
Greasemonkey compiler - turn greasemonkey scripts into complete Firefox extensions
by Jason Clarke Mar 31st 2006
Are you a Greasemonkey addict, but wish sometimes that you could turn your favorite GM script into a
full-fledged Firefox extension? Well, you're in luck. Greasemonkey Compiler can take any greasemonkey script as input, and output a completely functional Firefox
extension. I can see this being very useful to allow family members to take advantage of my favorite Gmail scripts
without having to explain greasemonkey to the less technical of them (okay, all of them).
I love the clean simplicity of this service, but I have to wonder; to produce standalone extensions, does all of the core logic in greasemonkey need to be contained in each extension? If I use a number of greasemonkey scripts, theoretically I could be adding a lot of overhead to my browser if I create extensions for all of them. The name "compiler" is a bit of a misnomer given that Firefox extensions are based on interpreted languages, but we can overlook that fact, given how slick this idea is.
Note that the site does not indicate what operating systems the produced extensions will work on. Windows works great - can anyone tell me if this also works for Macs and Linux PCs?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Scott Turner said 12:31PM on 3-31-2006
I don't know whether it has been mentioned on Lifehacker, but for more GreaseMonkey goodness, check out platypus.mozdev.org, an extension that allows you to visually edit a web page and automatically create a GM script to repeat that edit the next time you visit the page.
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glitch p-udding said 1:05PM on 3-31-2006
not quite sure why someone would want to do this. greasemonkey scripts take up very little memory and only run when appropriate pages load up.
extentions run all the time, waste memory, slow down the browser, and can cause crashes when you're not even using their functionality.
as for ease of installation, after the initial step of installing greasemonkey, it seems to be no more complicated than anything else.
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Brady said 3:41PM on 3-31-2006
The greasemonkey compiler is outdated. The extensions won't run in firefox 1.5. Also to answer you're question, it does not include the greasemonkey extension. It takes your javascript,adds some to load it on the pages you want and then creates an install file.This is all zipped up into an xpi.
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PB said 9:14PM on 3-31-2006
glitch pudding: did you NOT read the blog write up? I will use Greasemonkey but I do see the usefulness of this to give it to a friend or family member who doesnt have greasemonkey and is not that tech savy and you might want them to have the functionality. Firefox on its own just murders my system if I walk away and don't close it.
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Fernando Cassia said 10:40AM on 4-01-2006
Wrong title.
It doesn't create a "firefox extension". It creates an XPI installer.
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Jeremy Dunck said 1:24PM on 4-02-2006
This one is up to date:
http://www.arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/script-compiler.php
And the main idea of this is that you'd (as a user script author) at some point want to grow functionality beyond what Greasemonkey provides; the compiler gives you an easy migration to a full-fledged extension.
And all FF extensions are cross-platform, unless the developer does something specific to make it not so (which is highly unlikely in the case of user scripts migrating to extensions).
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Tom Wright said 6:33PM on 4-02-2006
This seems to be a great way for hobbyist developers to move towards greasemonkey to extensions.
It may even be easier on resourses for scripts which are required to run on many pages (lightbox for example).
As someone confident in javascript I'll definitely give this a look.
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