Greasemonkey Scripts

Greasemonkey Scripts: Endless Features for any Browser

Do you want to download a complete Facebook album in one click? Make your life easier on a browser game? View images and videos behind a URL without clicking on it? These are only a few of the functionalities we can add to any browser, using Greasemonkey scripts.

What is Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is an extension that allows us to run custom scripts on any website, before or after the website is loaded. This allows us to make personalized changes, that are permanent for our browser.

The scripts are written in JavaScript and they can be applied to a single page, a whole domain, or even every page the browser visits, depending on the script.

There are currently hundreds of thousands ready-made Greasemonkey scripts we can download to add functionalities to websites such as Facebook, YouTube, eBay, Github, and more.

There are also many scripts for online games such as Grepolis, Kingdoms of Camelot, and even Farmville.

How to install add ons for Greasemonkey scripts on any browser

The original Greasemonkey is an add-on for Mozilla Firefox, and we can install it as any other add-on.

We will find however other add ons for any real browser (i.e. not Internet Explorer) to run Greasemonkey scripts.

There is Tampermonkey for Google Chrome...

...Violentmonkey for Opera...

...Ninjakit for Safari, and an alternative to Tampermonkey for Chrome...

...and a mobile Tampermonkey for Android.

Of those, Firefox's Greasemonkey, has the highest compatibility with Greasemonkey scripts, but many of the most popular scripts will be compatible for all the different browser add ons.

Where can I find Greasemonkey scripts?

For years, the one-stop-shop for Greasemonkey scripts was userscripts.org. Unfortunately, userscripts.org shut down for good in August 2014.

We can still find a static mirror of it on http://userscripts-mirror.org/, but it has limited functionality.

There are however some excellent userscripts.org alternatives.

GreasyFork

It's neither Greasy nor a Fork, but GreasyFork is home to more than 6150 scripts, and the most popular of them have tens of thousands of installs.

Kingdoms of Camelot is a very popular theme for Greasemonkey scripts on this website, but we will also find a large number of scripts for Facebook..

and a huge list of specialized Greasemonkey scripts for other sites.

OpenUserJS

OpenUserJS is a much smaller website than GreasyFork, that currently has less than 1800 Greasemonkey scripts.

Some of the scripts, though, are extremely popular, such as the Quack Toolsammlung script for the popular Grepolis browser strategy game.

The biggest group of Greasemonkey scripts on OpenUserJS is for YouTube, and we will also find scripts for userscripts.org and OpenUserJS themselves.

MonkeyGuts

This is a brand new repository, and currently they are having some trouble with their HTTPS certificate.

We can however click on "Advanced" and proceed to the site itself.

Once inside, we will find about 500 Greasemonkey scripts.

Are Greasemonkey scripts safe?

Greasemonkey scripts are pure JavaScript code, which is not as thoroughly checked as are add ons in Chrome Store and Firefox.

That means it's entirely possible that some Greasemonkey scripts are malware.

If we stick to popular scripts with lots of reviews, we are probably safe, but we should avoid lesser known scripts, or scripts that seem to good to be true.

Are Greasemonkey scripts legal?

Some scripts offer automation, such as liking everything on our Facebook wall, or adding functionality to online games.

Now, this isn't strictly illegal, in the sense that there is now government law against it. It can however violate the Terms of Service of a particular website, and this website has the right to ban our account, temporarily or permanently.

So, we should be careful, especially regarding online gaming, to avoid any nasty surprises.