Greasemonkey Now Available On Chrome

This is a very useful news for anyone using Google’s Chrome browser. The popular scripting plugin that is frequently a FireFox user’s favorite, is now available on Chrome 4. Greasemonkey is now available on Chrome. Greasemonkey is a simple plugin that lets users modify their web browser experience in anyway they want. Scripts can be site specific or universal. These are simple Javascripts that users can make on their own or download from various online places. The significance of this one Chrome is immense.

Chrome started supporting extensions last December and since then there has been rapid development with over 2000 plugins now being available for the browser. With the addition of Greasemonkey, that number just made a jump of 40,000 more plugins! Yes, that is how many separate Greasemonkey scripts are estimated to be out there at this moment.

If you have never used Greasemonkey and have always wanted to add some extra features to some websites, you should try it out right now. Greasemonkey scripts can do a lot of things to a website — from changing the layout to suit your needs to adding extra options and displaying content from other websites on the website you want.

Popular uses of Greasemonkey include adding direct download buttons on onlinevideo sites like Youtube and adding additional functionality to websites like MySpace and other place. If you want to use the plugin right now on Chorme 4.0, you can go to Userscripts.org — the greatest place on the internet for Greasemokey scripts. Apparently, not all scripts will work right now. About 80-85 percent of all available scripts should be working right now.

There is another extremely helpful plugin that compliments Greasemonkey and it is called GreaseFire (FireFox only AFAIK). It shows up available scripts from Userscripts.org whenever you visit a site. Like if you go to YouTube and click on the icon, it will show you all the available scripts for YouTube. You can then choose and install right there, without having to visit the website and search and install.

Over all, the addition of Greasemonkey has pushed Chrome into becoming an even better browser and more of a competition to FireFox. However, with great usability comes great burden — plugins tend to slow things down considerably. Apple does not allow Safari to have extensions so easily and it remains my favorite browser. How Chrome handles the increasing number of plugins remains to be seen but definitely makes it more useful.

Related posts: