How to Install Greasemonkey and Userscripts in Chrome !

Greasemonkey was originally developed as a Firefox addon which allows a user to install some userscripts and modifies the webpage in real time. These modification made by userscripts can be used to make a web site more readable or more functional. The use fix rendering bugs that the site owner can’t be bothered to fix themselves. The user can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud. Even data can be retrieved automatically from other websites to make two websites more interrelated.

Recently with the release of Chrome Extensions Gallery, the users of Chrome are mounting. Many of the users are migrating to Chrome from Firefox. In order to get the exact advantages of Firefox’s Extensibility, we need to find some basic alternatives of Firefox addons in Chrome Extensions. Although the users have to bear some inconvenience as Chrome and its extensions are still fresh. But Greasemonkey is such a necessity without which Firefox addicts can’t even think to switch. In order to find a solution, I looked in both official and unofficial extensions gallery but didn’t find one.
Two manual solutions were found

1. Saving userscripts in User’s default profile directory related to Chrome and then launch Chrome with –enable-user-scripts flag. After some efforts, I got successful.
2. There is a bookmarklet which converts a userscript into bookmarklet. In my experience, many userscripts didn’t work after the conversion.

To my surprise, I found out the Chrome Team is committed to provide full support of userscripts by default that means with out any Greasemonkey extension. The feature to install userscripts without any Greasemonkey extension is available in the current beta build of Chrome which can be downloaded form here. Currently, there are some known issues but the feature is likely to improve as one of the men behind Greasemonkey, Aaron Boodman, is one of the technical leads of Chrome Extensions team.

In order to test the functionality of userscripts in Chrome without a Greasemonkey extension, two userscripts were installed; YouTube Enhancer and Adsweep, and they almost worked perfectly. Adsweep userscripts which blocks/hides ads even outperformed the ad blocking extensionsdeveloped for Chrome.
The userscripts are installed as extensions and can be disabled or uninstalled as other extensions are. Some serious features to modify userscripts are missing like which webpage to be included or excluded and executing manual userscripts command. It is likely that these enhancements will be available in next Chrome Versions. This has been tested on Windows and I am unable to make sure that this works on Linux and Mac as well. Tell us your experience if anyone has examined this.

Posted in: Tips