First released just over a year ago, Chrome has come to occupy 6% of the browser market worldwide, becoming the third most popular browser behind Internet Explorer and Firefox. As it continues to add features, it is poised to gain even more ground. Last December, the addition of browser extensions filled one of the browser’s biggest shortcomings, and today the little browser that could has taken another step in the right direction by adding support for Greasemonkey scripts.
Greasemonkey, previously only a Firefox add-on, lets you customize the way a website is displayed using small bits of Javascript, and we’re excited to see it added to one of the faster, tidier browsers available.
Actually, it looks like Greasemonkey support has been available since the last version of Google Chrome was released, but maybe Google forgot to mention it. In his blog post today, Greasemonkey creator Aaron Boodman said that 15% to 25% of scripts may not work on Chrome because of differences between it and Firefox. But, with more than 40,000 scripts available, this should still leave well over 30,000 working scripts for you to browse.
Greasemonkey scripts perform a variety of nifty little functions, from autofilling Twitter usernames to hiding links on Digg that you’ve already dugg.
While users were able to manually install Greasemonkey scripts before Chrome 4, this latest version provides native support and one-click installation. We gave it a quick test run and everything was just as advertised. Pick a Greasemonkey script, read up on it, and if you decide you like it and trust it, click install. Voila!
We’d been expecting this development since December, when we noticed that Boodman had been hired onto the Chrome Extensions team. It looks like the day has finally come. If you’ll excuse us, we have a couple thousand new browser tweaks we need to go check out.
