Grease Monkey, Your New Best Friend

With my recent change from using a smart Captcha to Akismet, I remembered reading somewhere about an extension for Firefox that would allow me to save my finger from scrolling a lot when reading down through Akismet spam. So, off to Google I went, and found that it was actually a two step thing– I needed a Firefox extension and some extensions to that extension. What I didn’t know what just how useful the first extension would be to my browsing.

Let me introduce you to Grease Monkey. This handy little extension is a basic tool that lets you do a lot with anything that you see in a web page. It does this through executing scripts that people write and post to Userscripts.org and you install them and run them in your Grease Monkey extension. So, in the case of Akismet, I have a Grease Monkey Script that goes through and shrinks the entries of the comments so that they are one or two liners instead of the full height.

But that’s not all, I’ve found and installed scripts to remove profanity from a site you a browsing, tons of stuff for ebay like displaying the total with the shipping, keep you logged into my ebay, and add a count down to the ebay page. But don’t just take my word for it! Browse through all the different scripts and see what you can do about changing the color, styling and information that’s presented on any page.