T11M

I posted a while back about having installed Greasemonkey to give it a try.  Well after about a month of use I’ve decided to let you know that I struggle using the web without it.  I use Google Reader all day to keep up with news and blogs, so that is where I have used Greasemonkey the most.  My first most used script is “Secure Connections On Sites”.  This script forces an https connection on a number of sites.  That way I use secure connections on all of Google’s pages as well as a large number of other sites without having to think about it.  Second and third on my list of great scripts are “Google Reader Minimalistic” and “Google Reader Preview Enhanced (patched)”.  Minamilistic strips all of the unnecessary chrome on the Reader page allowing many more stories to be displayed on the screen at one time.  The preview script then allows me to view the story in its original form without opening tabs.  Sure the page displays in an iframe and I have to scroll a little more, but it is much faster than having to open, closing, and switch between tabs – not to mention it reduces the number of tabs I have open at any one time.  The last very functional script I want to mention is “Google Account Multi-Login”.  This script replaces the logout link with a drop down menu that holds all of your separate Google accounts.  This works great for me since I have two main Google accounts that I use and bounce back and forth between a couple times a day.  It would also work great for those people who share a computer and trust each other with their login info (you know, like husbands and wives ). 

Just as a warning for those of you who care about browser speed – I have noticed a small reduction in Firefox’s speed rendering pages while using Greasemonkey.  But remember you can specify the pages that you don’t want scripts to run on.  Thus I only see a small hit in my browsing speed and it’s only on a few pages where the benefit of the script restructuring the page far outweighs the performance losses.  I also haven’t had any problems with crashing in Firefox (well, no more than usual) with the use of Greasemonkey.