Using Greasemonkey With Chrome

Greasemonkey is an add-on application for different browsers that allows a user to install scripts. The scripts allowed can be run to bring instant changes to HTML based web pages by manipulating page contents. Writing a Greasemonkey script is similar to writing JavaScript for a webpage. Greasemonkey scripts can be used for various reasons such as to add new functions on a page like combining data from different websites, fixing webpage bugs, embedding a product’s price on another webpage and more. Once a Greasemonkey script has been run, every time you open the page the same scripts will automatically be executed.

Greasemonkey is disabled in Chrome by default but it can be enabled through the following:

1. Go to this website, where there are many builds types of Chromium to download. Look for the most recent version and download it onto your PC. Extract the downloaded files to a new folder.

2. Now, we need to run a file, preferably using a tiny script. To create the script, open notepad and copy/paste into it this line: chrome.exe –enable-greasemonkey. Save the file with any name you like. Note: when you write this line in the notepad, also prefix the path of chrome.exe. For example: c:\chromefiles\chrome.exe –enable-greasemonkey

3. From the extracted files from the download, copy all with .user.js extension to the c:\scripts directory. The files with .user.js are scripts that you will run.

You can download more scripts from userscripts.org. Just go to the website, click on the script you want, when the new page opens, click on Install and the script will show on the page. Just copy and paste the whole text from the screen to notepad then save the file in c:\scripts folder. Give it any name and an .user.js extension.

Finally, open Chrome or refresh it to see the changes and you are done.

Greasemetal is similar to Greasemonkey, which uses JavaScript files to modify the WebPages being displayed. It supports Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

To download GreaseMetal, click here. Once downloaded, launch the setup to install it. Once installed, launch Greasemetal from the start menu programs, which will in turn start Chrome.

You can download more scripts from the same Userscripts.org site. When you download, add them to useris directory under My Documents (XP) or Documents (Vista) folder.