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.

FLOSS, Web Firefox, Greasemonkey

So a friend at work showed me Tab Mix Plus today. It’s a Firefox Addon that allows awesome customization of the tab features in Firefox. You can change the way tabs open, enable click functionality (middle click, double click, etc), and change the way the tab bar functions. Pretty freakin’ sweet. Man I love the functionality of Firefox!

Linux, OS X, Windows Firefox

I finally gave in and installed Greasemonkey for Firefox. I didn’t like the thought of using Javascript written by someone else to modify web pages, but after playing with it for a few minutes the functionality is definitely apparent. My favorite script so far is “Google Reader Preview Enhanced” which enables the ability to view the web page the story comes from within Reader. So now I don’t have to open a tab every time I want to finish a story I just click the link and it opens a preview. The best part about Greasemonkey is how transparent and easy to disable it is. If you don’t want to have any of your Greasemonkey scripts run on a page simply click on the monkey head in the bottom corner of your screen. Rock on developers for Mozilla, rock on!

Web Firefox, Greasemonkey