Your browser doesn’t have to be the boss of you – if you’re a Firefox user there are a wold of different ways you can change how it displays your favorite websites. One of the most powerful is Greasemonkey, a plug-in that lets you install other little plug-ins (“scripts”) that change the functionality or appearance of a wide variety of sites.
Greasemonkey is easy to use, fast and powerful. Most scripts are hosted and discussed at Userscripts.org, but that site can be a little overwhelming. In the past week, 375 scripts were added or updated. We looked through them all and picked out the best 5. Below we’ve also posted a screencast that will get you started harmlessly hacking your browser with Greasemonkey in under 5 minutes.
How to Use Greasemonkey
RSS readers can click here to view the video below.
Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Here’s a Flash version, if you prefer it.)
Now What?
There are a lot of must-use Greasemonkey scripts that have been published before this week. Some of our favorites include:
Autopagerize – continuous scrolling from page to page on many websites.
Twitter Search on Google Results Pages – add real-time search to Google.
Memeorandum Colors – color code links on political blog aggregator Memeorandum by the politics of each blog’s linking history.
Those are oldies-but-goodies but more and more scripts are available every day. Here are our favorite 5, in no particular order, out of the 375 that were added to or updated on Userscripts.org last week.
1. Gmail 3.0 Productivity Package – adds links to create new Google Docs and integrates other Google services into the GMail interface.
2. Alltop Topic Search and OPML
Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop has aggregated the top sources on a long list of topics. This script makes it even more useful by allowing you to search inside each category’s archives and export the RSS feeds for all the selected sources into another RSS reader.
3. Google Search Sidebar with Youtube , Wikipedia, Dictionary.com and Flickr Results
In the image above you can see the Twitter Google script results at the top of the page (described above) and this Wikipedia, etc. script on the right hand sidebar. The script works well.
Sick of having to log back in to sites all the time? This script rewrites the expiration date on all cookies in your browser, making them live for 50 years!
5. Vidzbigger
This script makes a bunch of changes to YouTube video pages. It displays the largest video player available, moves the comments into the right sidebar so you can view them while watching the video and it inserts links to download a copy of all videos. It isn’t the prettiest thing in the world and has the audacity to insert an ad overlay after videos are completed. It may not be pretty, but it’s useful.
Those Are Our Favorites, What About You?
We’d love to hear about your favorite Greasemonkey scripts, too. There are so many of them out there that it’s hard to unearth the best. There’s nothing quite like it though, when you find a way to change the very browser you look at the web through.
