I’ve been playing with Greasemonkey again. For those that don’t know already, Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that lets you run javascript scripts in the browser to execute on various web pages. The scripts can be excluded to only run on certain pages, allowing you to modify the page’s contents, perform actions, etc.
I played with Greasemonkey a while back, and thought it was really interesting, but I couldn’t come up with a lot of practical applications for it at the time. The add-on came up in a conversation I was having with someone, and as a result I decided to revisit it. I still haven’t come up with anything amazing to do with it, but I have been finding it increasingly helpful to cutout a few clicks in my daily web browsing. For example, I now have it submit forms on login pages to automatically log me into sites I visit often. I also have it setup to navigate to a page from a site if I often go to the same page after login. For example, maybe you get dumped to a landing page when you first login, but you always want to go to a specific section right after that. In this case, I’d setup a script to run on the page that I land on that automatically takes me to the second page (that I really wanted to go to) instead. These kind of things might sound silly, but most often they’re a single line of js and they can save me a couple clicks a day. Those clicks add up! Not to mention the ease of use factor, since I don’t have to be annoyed by the fact that I have to find the silly link every time I login.
For any of you out there that know even a hint of JS I’d really recommend checking it out. It can be a great time saver on these little, trivial things and make your web browsing that much easier.
