While Greasemonkey, the popular extension for changing the way websites display, might not be currently available via the Firefox 3 addons manager or the Mozilla addons website, you can indeed install a working version from the developer's site. We installed the greasemonkey-0.8.20080609.0.xpi into Firefox 3 RC2 on Mac OS 10.5, and our scripts worked like a charm.
In case you're new to the Greasemonkey realm, here are three scripts to get you going:
Gmail 2.0 Multiple HTML Signatures - allows you to maintain a set of HTML signatures for Gmail that are automatically changed when you select different "From" addresses in your compose mail window. Alternatively, you could use a bookmarklet.
Digg Add Mirrors - adds links to Coral Cache, Duggmirror, Duggback, and Google Cache to Digg stories.
Image Host Redirector - redirects image links directly to image instead of intermediate image host page.
User Script Compiler is a tool that creates a Firefox extension from a Greasemonkey script. So why would you want to do that? The answer is simple: for the mass majority of Firefox users that fear associating anything called "Greasemonkey" with their computers, and who panic at the mention of "scripts."
Intrepid techies such as Gina Tripani of Lifehacker have worked to make Greasemonkey scripts more digestible (her Better Gmail is a selection of scripts wrapped in a simple Firefox extension). Now, with the User Script Compiler, there is a way for all users to easily convert Greasemonkey scripts into the one-click simplicity of a Firefox extension, with no programming experience required.
Converting a Greasemonkey script into a Firefox extension does take a bit of legwork--but we're confident all you Download Squad readers could do this in your sleep.
First, you'll need to track down your installed scripts. They're in your Firefox profile, under the "gm_scripts" sub-folder. Or, if you'd prefer, you can skip the search and download any script from the online script repository.
Next, you need to change the file extension from .js (Javascript) to .txt (plain text). After you've changed the extension, double-click the file to view the code. Copy and paste the code into the User Script Compiler and hit "Generate."
Voila! Your new Firefox extension (.xpi) is complete. To install in Firefox, simply drag the new extension onto the Firefox interface and follow the prompts.
We checked out Shankri-la's linky goodness of 17 new Greasemonkey scripts to bump your new Gmail experience up a notch. Here's our 5 favorites from the list which should add more fabulousness and functionality to your favorite email client.
Enhance Gmail- integrates Google Calendar, and Google Chat within Gmail. Removes the annoying invites box, Google user id from the top bar, and the footer. Gmail Account Multi-Login- the dream script you've been looking for. Allows you to toggle between your Gmail accounts without siging out. Saweet.
FB Gmail - for the Facebook user. Now you can get your FB notifications in Gmail. Gmail Attachment Reminder - nice Doh! prevention. Reminds you to attach a file to your Gmail if it appears that you have not, based on whether you have the word attach(ed, ment, etc) in the body. That's our top 5, but you can check out the 12 other useful scripts to make your Gmail experience richer and more productive. Now, if only there was a script to precisely and artfully select the important stuff from the junk. But on second thought, that would pose the much bigger problem of figuring out what to do with all the extra time that would free up while at work.
On third thought, culling through enormous quantities of the good, the bad and the ugly makes us seem so much more productive and oh, the satisfaction you get when emptying your trash.
You have probably noticed this yourself: when you do a search on Google there tends to be a lot of unfilled, unused, or otherwise blank area to the right of the search results that could be used for better things. Things besides ads that might relate to your search. Such as Wikipedia summaries for your search term, or related images and videos, and dictionary definitions. That would be nice, wouldn't it?
Well, If you've ever had such dreams of grandeur, that wish has been fulfilled.
It's called Google Extra, a Greasemonkey script that adds just that extra functionality you've been looking for in your Google searches. Let's say you search for the term "monkeys." Not only are you served your usual search results about "monkeys" on the left, but results from an image search, video search, a Wikipedia entry on "monkeys," and the dictionary definition of what monkeys are on the right.
The nice thing is, you can organize the stack of result boxes in any way you want. So, if for convenience's sake, you preferred a dictionary definition at the very top before your image results, you can do that. The script remembers your preferences, locking in every last ounce of goodness from your searches. That, and the extra results load after your primary ones, which keeps the experience quick and snappy without a noticeable increase in page load times.
Earlier today we showed you how to enable a preview for TinyUrls by using the 'Enable preview' feature from the TinyUrl website - allowing you to forgo the leap of faith these little links would usually require of you.
Wish there was a more elegant approach to the problem? Well, for Firefox users (and other browsers for which Greasemonkey is available) this has been solved, thanks to a Greasemonkey script that does for TinyUrl links what X-rays did for the world of medicine.
Once you have installed the script, all you have to do is hover over a TinyUrl link to see where it leads. So simple it's beautiful. And although you can always enable the TinyUrl preview option with a browser cookie from the TinyUrl website, it's not nearly as slick or integrated as the TinyUrl Popup Preview script.
So, if you're paranoid of people sneaking you weird links disguised in TinyUrls or simply want to know where that link in a tweet from a Twitter friend points to, the TinyUrl Popup Preview script for Greasemonkey fits the bill.
Log into Gmail today and you might see big red warning about Greasemonkey scripts. For those of you keeping score, Google has been spiffing up Gmail over the past few weeks, including a nice code overhaul, colored labels, group chat and AIM capabilities. Oh, and the tasty IMAP. Now it appears some scripts have become such a nuisance that Google offers a chance to "fix this" which we declined. Unfortunately, their help files have no specific info on Greasemonkey, so once you've dismissed this warning there appears to be no going back. What the "fix this" button does do is recommend you upgrade to Better Gmail 2.
There's good new and bad news in the fact that Google is rolling out an updated version of Gmail. On the one hand, pages load quicker and there's an advanced contact manager. On the other hand, many of your favorite Firefox extensions for tweaking Gmail may have stopped working.
For a while now, personal productivity site Lifehacker has been rolling up some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail into a package called Better Gmail. And Google went ahead and broke pretty much every single one of those scripts with its new version.
Now Lifehacker has released the initial version of Better Gmail 2. It doesn't have all the features of Better Gmail 1. In fact, right now there are only about 6 options, compared with more than 25 in the old version of Better Gmail. But considering the fact that most users are just starting to see the new Gmail interface, we suspect it will take a little while before the Greasemonkey coders get around to making all of their hacks "newer version" compatible. In the meantime, Lifehacker promises to continue updating both the Better Gmail 1 and Better Gmail 2 packages until Google eliminates the "older version" option. Then all development will be on Better Gmail 2.
Ugh - just as fast and hot as the love affair started, it is starting to fizzle. Facebook opened its doors to add-on apps, and while we just can't wait to be invited to become a zombie, pirate, or post on YAFW (yet another Facebook wall), enough is enough already.
If you're feeling Facebook App Overload (we're thinking of copyrighting that term... no, not really), then you need the Facebook Profile Cleaner Greasemonkey script.
In our testing, the Facebook Profile Cleaner does a fantastic job of getting rid of all of the gunk. Maybe, in fact, too good. It seems like some parts of Facebook itself are also getting blocked (most notably the mini-feed), but if you're like us and totally overwhelmed with nonsense on Facebook, maybe this "less is more" approach is worth considering.
Thanks to Lifehacker for pointing out this lifesaver.
Lifehacker points us to a fantastic Greasemonkey script called Pagerization that will automatically extend pages downwards by appending the contents of the next page to the bottom. This is useful on sites like Google (Search, Image, News, Group, Video), Yahoo, Wikipedia, Hatena, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, digg and Userscripts.org.
We've been using the precursor, GoogleAutoPager, for a while now and loving it. It's fantastic to see this concept extended to be useful on so many other sites.
Fed up with Digg's recent comment system changes? You're not alone. Digg's new "threaded" comment system, which collapses the replies in a mess of Ajax slickness, has irritated quite a few previously happy Digg users.
This Greasemonkey script does its dead-level best to put Digg back the way it was, by automatically expanding all the threaded comments left on each story's detail view.
We're ambivalent on the issue. Sure, you have to click more to read all the comments on a particular story -- although, most times, god only knows why you'd want to -- it does prevent the "reply to first post" mess which inevitably contains a few links to things that are only partially related.
So I've recently become a Facebook addict. I know, I'm late to the party, but I'd been trying to avoid the social-network-du-jour syndrome that I saw my friends all suffering from. But Facebook has simply become too tantalizing.
Of course, after a few days of playing with it, there were a few things that I found that I wasn't happy about. So, like any true Firefox geek, I decided to see if any Greasemonkey scripts were available that would make my Facebook experience more pleasant. And boy, I wasn't disappointed.
On Userscripts alone, there are well over 200 Facebook-related user scripts (Greasemonkey scripts) available. Now, to be fair, the number of useful scripts is far, far lower than that, since a huge number of these ones are dedicated to changing the colors or theme of the site to match with a school or fraternity's colors. Still, there are some very good ones to be mined from this list.
My favorites so far include:
Facebook Fixer - Shows larger profile pictures, shows additional menu items, adds people's age to their profile listing, and changes Facebook redirected off-site links to direct links.
Great, so you've managed to upload all of your Word and Excel documents to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. But now that your hard drive's crashed, you want to download all of those files again. There's got to be a better way than downloading them one by one, right?
While Google gives you a way to save a group of files as HTML documents, one user decided he could do better and created a batch download script. The solution requires Firefox, Greasemonkey, and a download manager like DownThemAll.
Then you install a script that will run in your Google Docs control panel. You can download every document in the All, Active, Starred, Spreadsheets, or Documents views. You can also download every file with a particular label. Just choose what format you want to save the files in and you'll be presented with a list of links. Now you can use your download manager to save each file listed on the page.
Odds are if you know what Greasemonkey is, you're not run running Internet Explorer, or at least not Internet Explorer 6. But if for some reason you're using IE6 and want the ability to run scripts that change the appearance of web pages on your browser, you might want to check out Turnabout.
The program comes loaded with a couple of useful scripts, including Ad Blocker for hiding ads on web sites, Book Burro for comparison shopping when looking at books, and Bug Me Not for skipping the registration process on certain websites.
You can also use Turnabout to run a number of other scripts although there's no guarantee that they'll work with Internet Explorer.
Gmail could very well be one of the most hackable web services of all time. One only needs to check our Gmail tag to see what tools are available for enhancing one's experience, and now we have a slick new cross-platform Firefox add-on to link to from our friends at Lifehacker: Better Gmail. As its name suggests, Better Gmail rounds up a number of popular Greasemonkey scripts and other extras into a handy management UI, complete with links to homepages if you need to find out more about any of the included extras. As you can see, this add-on packs a wallop, including many of our old (and new) favorites such as the Macros script (for many more keyboard shortcuts Gmail should really have in the first place), an Unlabelled label hack and a Filter Assistant which brings that handy email client functionality of building filters from a currently selected message. Of course, one could run out and find all these scripts on their own, but Better Gmail takes the clicking out of that process and wraps all this great stuff into one handy extension, complete with the ability to disable it all in one fell swoop in case you need to get back to Gmail's basics.
Computerworld has a recent article that lists 10 Firefox extensions that they believe users should avoid, with a subtitle stating "Just because an extension is popular doesn't mean it belongs in your Web browser." Unfortunately, the criteria used to determine what should be avoided seems very loose; everything from "so you don't hurt yourself due to your own ignorance", to more self-serving interests like ensuring that readers actually see the ads on Computerworld's website.
Some inarguably essential extensions are on it, making this list pretty difficult to accept. Greasemonkey, for example, is listed as an extension to avoid. The author clarifies that at the very least if you're going to use it, be careful about which user scripts you use. While there's nothing wrong with that sentiment, it's one that goes without saying for any user that is sophisticated enough to be using an extension that exists as a way to actively modify web content locally in your browser.
Similarly, Computerworld lists AdBlock and AdBlock Plus as extensions to avoid, simply because they attempt to block all online advertising. Truthfully, these extensions aren't great for online publishers, but to be fair they do make for a significantly better web browsing experience. This recommendation doesn't appear to be made in the reader's best interests.
While an article that lists extensions that should be avoided seems like a good idea, it should be based on some sort of specific criteria, like extensions that have stability, performance or security flaws. A few recommendations on the list fall into this category, but the list is pretty inconsistent in this regard.
The list of extensions that probably shouldn't have made this list is longer than those that belong on it. If you're a computing neophyte, Computerworld's list might apply to you. For anyone that has consciously chosen to download a 3rd party browser like Firefox, you're probably more than capable of figuring out how to responsibly use these extensions if they have features you'd like to use.
While Greasemonkey, the popular extension for changing the way websites display, might not be currently available via the Firefox 3 addons manager or the Mozilla addons website, you can indeed install a working version from the developer's site. We installed the greasemonkey-0.8.20080609.0.xpi into Firefox 3 RC2 on Mac OS 10.5, and our scripts worked like a charm.
Ugh - just as fast and hot as the love affair started, it is starting to fizzle. Facebook opened its doors to add-on apps, and while we just can't wait to be invited to become a zombie, pirate, or post on YAFW (yet another Facebook wall), enough is enough already. 
Fed up with Digg's recent comment system changes? 
Computerworld has a recent article that lists 
