11 Best Greasemonkey Scripts that Actually Work with Chrome

Posted 02/04/2010 at 8:00pm | by David Murphy

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One of Mozilla Firefox's bigger advantages over Google Chrome has just been wiped away and, dare we say, Google Chrome has actually one-upped its rival in terms of overall usability and ease-of-installation. We're referring, of course, to Greasemonkey. You might have heard this name echoed across tech and tweak sites far and wide. As well you should have--the functionality you can achieve by this upgrade to your surfing experience is simply unsurpassed in its depth or scope by any conventional add-on or extension.

It's quite simple, really. You install Greasemonkey to gain access to a gallery of add-ons that benefit your browsing experience just as much as your favorite official "add-ons," if not more. By add-ons, we mean "scripts." In its conventional format, Greasemonkey is a browser add-on that grants you the ability to automatically integrate new Javascript-based modifications to a site whenever you load up the page. You don't have to design these modifications yourself--a huge gallery of scripts (more than 40,000!) have already been written for a wide swath of functions and locations. Consider Greasemonkey scripts to be analogous to extensions for Greasemonkey--itself an extension for your main browser.

Or, at least, for most browsers--Google Chrome doesn't force you to install a separate extension in order to access this huge body of customized tweaks and modifications. You can thank Aaron Boodman for that. He created Greasemonkey back in 2004 and, as luck might have it, now works at Google as a software engineer. The whole point of that short story is to give a little bit of background for Chrome's interpretation of Greasemonkey scripts. It's rather ingenious, really. Chrome automatically converts these hunks of Javascript into browser-suppoted extensions, which gives you the ability to install, uninstall, and configure your Greasemonkey scripts just as easily as you would a normal extension. You don't need a separate add-on, nor do you even need to restart your browser to fiddle around with all the scripts you want.

And by "all the scripts you want," we mean, "most of the scripts you want." Not all Greasemonkey scripts work perfectly in Google Chrome. The running estimation is that roughly 20 percent of what's out there is currently broken for Google's browser. That's not great news for a person who's easily frustrated by failure. However, here's where Maximum PC comes into the picture. We've run through a large swath of awesome Google Greasemonkey scripts to achieve two key goals: to see what works and to see which scripts, of the 40,000+ available, are awesome tweaks for your browser. That said, here's a list of 11 excellent Greasemonkey scripts that you should put at the top of your must-have list, depending on your browsing preferences:

Inline Google Player

This one's a Lifehacker original and, if you find yourself often searching for new jams on the Web, a complete lifesaver. The premise is simple. Whenever the script detects a link to an MP3 file on a page, it'll throw a little "Play" link after the actual hyperlink. Click on "Play," and a small Flash-based streaming player will appear. Preview your tune. Decide if you like it. Rock out.

Download it here!

Yays! (Yet Another YouTube Script)

We, like most people, enjoy watching videos on Youtube. But what we don't enjoy is waiting for these videos to buffer, and especially when the playback catches up to the end of said buffering. When we want to watch cats chasing each other around, we want it in its full, uninterrupted glory. The Yays script makes this possible... and more! You can now toggle whether you want Youtube videos to autoplay or not, and you can also select a default quality setting for said videos--no more paused playback or 360p videos when you can instead be watching a full, uninterrupted, 1080p stream.

Download it here!

Remove Facebook Ads

Annoying advertisements, especially those related to Mob-based Facebook games or hints of things to come (are YOU getting married! Buy a RING TODAY!), are often a source of laughter--and complaints--on good ol' Facebook. Install this script and you'll never be prompted to "CHECK OUT THIS NEW ENERGY DRINK" or "HEY ARE YOU PREGNANT" ever again.

Download it here!

Greased Lightbox

If you find yourself often searching for images on the 'net, then this script should increase the awesomeness of your conventional experience to a great degree. Instead of jumping to normal HTML pages when you click on picture links--like on Flickr, for example), Greased Lightbox slaps these images into, well, a lightbox. The background of the page you're viewing fades down and the image you're looking at appears in the center of your screen. You can then use keyboard commands to scroll through subsequent images and increase or decrease the size of the picture you're viewing.

Download it here!

Secure Connections on Sites

This one's simple -- when you hit up a particular site on this script's list (like Amazon, Facebook, or Paypal), the script will automatically force your browser to use the more secure https:// version of the page.

Download it here!