Greasing the monkey

David Kidd reminds himself that complacency is the enemy of discovery.

Around four years ago I tried a little known app called Phoenix, which is now an extraordinarily well known app called Firefox. It was a free, lightweight, open source, tabbed browser that starting to gain publicity as an alternative to crappy IE or paid-for Opera. Already it had something going for it, but it was the moment I first installed an extension that had me hooked.

I’ve now been putting in and pulling out extensions for years, watching it crash every now and then, but steadily becoming more stable with every release. After settling on a handful of extensions that work in harmony, I haven’t felt the need to install anything else. But that blissful overconfidence made me miss the best extension, hands down, that was ever unleashed on the ‘fox: Greasemonkey.

Greasemonkey on its own has one simple job: it allows you to run user scripts to change how a website renders in your browser. That’s it. Sounds simple, but this little monkey is one of the shining lights in the webbed world.

The first thing I greased was Gmail. In order to try out Gmail’s ‘revolutionary’ email system, I knew I had to get a large volume of emails running through it, so I’ve had the hundreds of non-spam work emails forwarded straight through Google’s service for the past six months. What use are Google’s Conversations when you’re only getting one or two personal emails a day? Does the funky interface actually have any credibility with continuous use at this level?

The answer is no. Sorry folks, out of its box, it’s just a funky interface for the dozen or so emails you get from your mates. When you start plugging through hundreds of emails a day, it doesn’t cut it. I’m not bitter, Gmail arguably isn’t supposed to be used that way, but it was a neat experiment.

But the advantage of Greasemonkey is to take something in its vanilla version and add some sprinkles to it. And now, Gmail starts to get the power it needs to be exceptionally useful for me. For example, the two major frustrations in Gmail is the clunky drop down action menu interface, and the lack of a preview mode.

When working with a large amount of email, the extra click it takes to hit delete is absolutely unnecessary. Instead, Greasemonkey scripts can let you stick a big whopping ‘delete’ button right on the toolbar to do precisely what should have been there in the first place.

Opening up emails and switching back and forth to the inbox adds lag to an already laggy service. What we need is a right-click preview that grabs the message body and sticks it in a floating speech bubble -- without leaving the inbox.

See where I’m going with this? This phenomenal extension has added immense power to Gmail, and that’s just one site.

So, if you’re thinking filters and pop-up blockers are all you need to customise your pages, check out Greasemonkey and start scripting. There are user scripts for many pages out there (including the two I mentioned here), and it’s not hard to do yourself.

Grab the extension at mozdev.org (mozdev.org) and check out some ready made scripts at userscripts.org/. When you’re done playing with other people’s monkeys, check out a guide here to get started on your own: http://diveintogreasemonkey.org

Know where I can get some cool scripts? Let me know at dkidd@pcauthority.com.au