Curiosity...

[sally_maria]

[Poll #1526257]

And if you do use Greasemonkey do you have any favourite scripts, ones you wouldn't want to surf the web without?

Comments

[nakeisha.livejournal.com]

No - but then I only use FF for the odd site.

[sally_maria]

Good point - I knew it was only going to be a fraction of a fraction and so far I've found one person on Dreamwidth besides me, and no one on LJ. The thing is that once you've got it installed, there are lots of useful userscripts that make using the net better, but you have to make the decision to install it in the first place.

Am I write in thinking Opera does something similar, out of the box? I've got the impression that some FF userscripts would work with Opera as well but I've no idea which ones.

[nakeisha.livejournal.com]

I'm actually surprised there are so few using it as I've seen it pop up many times in various LJ comms how people have used Grease Monkey to tweak this, that and the other and how they use it all the time and love it.

I've got a couple of FF userscripts that I believe were put together with Greasemonkey that I use to make the profile page look as it used to look and also to stop that whatsit bar that people can have on their journals/comms and make everyone who visits their journal/comm vanish.

[sally_maria]

Well, I've found one on LJ now. :-) I was probably expecting a few more to say yes, but I know that a lot of my flist don't have nearly as much time as I do for tweaking my browser to do exactly what I want.

Yes, I think I've seen those scripts. That's the great thing about Greasemonkey, it enables you to customise what you see much more, and doesn't limit you to what is best for the majority. Or it does incredibly useful things like the Expand Threads script that I used to use before paid users got it thrown in.

[nakeisha.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you found one. That's one reason I prefer Opera to FF because with FF I have to download half a dozen (at least) add-ons to get what Opera gives me to begin with or get with just tweaking and not add-ons. Plus, the big thing I use several times a day the 'in page search' I can't have where I want it in FF. So I just use it for the odd site or two. But most of my flist love it and swear by it. Plus, with the exception of the odd site, I find Opera faster.

I was really glad to find those scripts to allow me to have the profile page 'back' how it was. I have a kind of mild dyslexia and one of the things I found was that before I had the script to put back the underlines on hyperlinks was that I literally couldn't make the links out. To be honest it would have made me use FF for LJ had someone not asked if it worked in Opera - it was that bad. The profile page was unusable to me.

[sally_maria]

Yes, I can understand why Opera makes sense for you. I've probably said this before but around the time that I realised that IE was a poor excuse for a browser, Opera was still running ads to pay for its free version, and I got sucked into the Firefox way of doing things. I know that finished long ago, but there's never been anything about Firefox that I've disliked enough to give me the incentive to switch.

My favourite personal use LJ script is the style=mine one. The thing is, most of the time I would rather see people's own journal layouts, because that's much more interesting. And I have the bookmarklet so I can reload an occasional unreadable page. But there are a few people/communities whose journals I visit regularly but whose layout I struggle with, and I can use the style=mine one to make those journals, and only those, load in my style when I visit them.

The great thing about it is that someone else could have a completely different list of unreadable styles, and the whole thing is flexible enough to accomodate that.

[nakeisha.livejournal.com]

We got into Opera when it still had small ads, but wasn't a paying version. Before that we used IE and/or Netscape depending. Oh, it's very much what you get used to.

Oh, yes, I use a LJ style=mine too. Like you I want to see the other layouts, but quite a few of them are unreadable after that. I have a button on my toobar for LJ My Style. Some nice kind person 'wrote' the code for me so it works in Opera.

Oh, exactly. I do agree. And I use My Style more and more these days. A new comm I'm kind of interested in has been set up. It has a black background and brown text. I struggle with any black backgrounds, but brown on black *g*

[deepbluemermaid.livejournal.com]

I have a couple of Greasemonkey scripts for particular sites, such as Twitter & Rapidshare. I have one for Dreamwidth which does something to the URL format.

[sally_maria]

It's very much the same for me. Most of the ones I use are for LJ actually - one to tell whether there are any new comments on entries, one to give me a link to the YouTube page for embedded videos and one for YouTube itself which buffers the videos when I load a page, instead of trying to play it straight away.

I haven't tried the Dreamwidth one you talk about though.

[deepbluemermaid.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Can we swap? The LJ & YouTube ones sound insanely useful, and I'd love to have them. The Dreamwidth one I have is called DW Link Style Rewriter.

[sally_maria]

The YouTube buffering one is here - http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49366 . Nothing more annoying than stuttering video going on in the background, and if you want to open more than one at once...

The YouTube link one may be broken at least on LJ - it no longer puts the link underneath. :-( The page is here anyway, just in case they get it working again... http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/38620

The New Comments one is here - http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2494 . It works on Dreamwidth as well, and these days I find it so annoying reading discussions without it. It works both on your friends page and on the entry itself, which is great once the threads start to collapse, you don't have to keep expanding things only to find you've read them already.

One I don't use anymore because I have a paid account, but which was the reason I started using Greasemonkey in the first place was LJ Thread Expander - http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/27128 . No more having to open collapsed threads in a separate tab.

I'll have to check out the Dreamwidth one - I don't think I've got any specific Dw ones. Thank you - I was hoping that there might be other users out there with recommendations.

[deepbluemermaid.livejournal.com]

Thank you for those links! I installed most of them, and found a bunch more useful things at the userscripts website :)

[sally_maria]

No problem - glad you found them useful.

The userscripts site is great. No, they can't guarantee things are safe, any more than Mozilla add-ons can, but it's a lot better than randomly installing scripts from people you don't know.

[alicambs.livejournal.com]

Now if you'd said Spacemonkey I'd given a momentary smile of pleasure and then wondered why you were asking such a bizarre question,:-) but Greasemonkey!!!????

[sally_maria]

I'd have to be a bit careful using Spacemonkey though, I think Jack might object. ;-)

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that enables you to have little bits of code that work on particular websites - like the one that tells me whether there are any new comments on an LJ post, or the one that stops YouTube videos playing until I specifically tell them to. Once you've started using it, you find all sorts of uses for it, but I did wonder how many people would have come across it - hence the poll.