Talkings of a Tyrant

Greasemonkey is one of the top Mozilla Firefox extensions for the web. It is the ultimate in customization.

Greasemonkey allows users to customize websites (yes, other people’s websites) to your likings. Don’t like the ads? Get rid of them. Hate the colors? Change them. Redirects wasting your time? Remove them. Simply install a userscript and Greasemonkey gets to work.

However, it isn’t quite that simple. If you’re not a skill javascript programmer (which I’m not), you and I have to rely on other people’s userscripts. Luckily, there is a large directory of user scripts over at, guess what, http://www.userscripts.org/.

Let’s take one example

If you use Gmail (Google Mail for UK users) and you don’t have a mail client on your computer (such as Thunderbird), then you probably get annoyed every time you see a mailto: link that opens up crappy Microsoft Outlook/doesn’t do anything.

However, there is a userscript that will automatically rewrite mailto: links into Gmail links.

First, go to Mailto Compose In GMail’s Userscript.org site.

Then you need to click in the box at the upper right, and click “Install this Script”.

The link should bring you to the direct code. Greasemonkey 0.6.4 is kind enough to pop up with a nice bar at the top instructing to simply click “Install”.

Then you go to any site with a mailto: link. One of my favorite sites is Lifehacker, so we’ll go there.

In the sidebar there should be this contact information.

Where before, “Email” under Gina Trapani’s name led you to “mailto:tips@lifehacker.com”, now with the magic of Greasemonkey, the URL is “https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=tips@lifehacker.com” Now your browser is truly set for the web!

Analysis

This is but one example of what Greasemonkey can do. It is a very powerful extension, and can give the right users almost complete control over what they view in their browser.

Greasemonkey is one of the ultimate extensions when it comes to customizability power. Seeing as I’m a control freak when it comes to web surfing, this is an excellent extension!

Download Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey Website
Dive Into Greasemonkey, a guide for beginning Greasemonkey programmers.
Download Firefox 1.5