When Google launched Extensions for Chrome in December, they had around 300 of them ready to go in their gallery. A day later, that number was already up to 500. By now, there are a few thousand available, and that number just got multiple by several times as Google has announced that the latest official version of Chrome, version 4, now natively supports Greasemoneky user scripts.
As Google engineer Aaron Boodman (who also happens to be the creator of Greasemonkey) writes today on the Chromium blog, on the popular site userscripts.org there are over 40,000 scripts alone. While he notes that not all of the user scripts written for Greasemonkey will work seamlessly with Chrome immediately (because of the differences between Chrome and Firefox), that should only affect 15%-25% of those over 40,000. He also notes that Google will continue to work on issues on their end to improve compatibility with these Greasemonkey scripts.
While neither side is likely to admit it, this is another big blow to Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Boodman wrote Greasemonkey in 2004 specifically for Firefox, and now he’s just helped a rival browser implement the majority of these scripts natively. And in fact, the native support works so well that Chrome actually treats these user scripts just like regular Chrome Extensions, so you can install and disable them in the same way you do with regular ones.
Boodman cautions users who choose to install these user scripts to be careful, as they can potentially access private data you’re browsing on a website. He notes that you should read the comments and descriptions on a user scripts’ page to figure out exactly what it’s doing before installing it. Still, there are a ton of very useful Greasemonkey user scripts out there, and this makes Chrome even better.
While obviously, Chrome 4 is only officially launched for Windows, the beta versions available for both Mac and Linux are also version 4. And actually, the newer dev builds across all platforms are already onto version 5, so these user scripts should work fine on all of them.
Userscripts are A LOT easier to develop than Chrome Extensions. I love the native support; it’s great.
That’s not really true; it’s pretty similar. The only “tricky” part is creating a manifest file to tell Chrome where to find the scripts you want to inject. But even that is pretty trivial.
well to be different, what I am aiming for the new extension is the ability to read more javascripts faster to put mozilla firefox to the grave.
Here’s what we’re talking about: http://bit.ly/chrome-browser-insane-javascript-reader
Basically every userscript that I’ve tried on Chrome has not worked — we’re talking probably 30 or 40 of them. Maybe I just have terrible luck, but I’m tempted to call BS on the “only 15%-20% won’t work”.
i assume you’re using Chrome 4 or higher? What OS?
I’ve tried both Chrome 4 (beta builds) and then recently tried the new Chrome 5 dev builds. Windows 7 and Windows XP.
In my tests with 20 scripts only(?) 8 worked. Note that some Greasemonkey scripts can be replaced with an iMacros for Chrome scripts (those that automate things, but not those that change things).
Just adding here that I have had the same experience with GM scripts. Not supported is my opinion. This just seems like added hype at this stage.
hoping google redesigned will be available for chrome too at some point.
google really wants ff dead
I really think Google’s targeting IE rather than FF. Google want’s to push standards because it drives innovation and allows them to query more structured/semantic data. I’d be surprised if Microsoft, Facebook or Yahoo don’t try to acquire Mozilla Corporation in the near future.
I still prefer FF over Chrome or Safari, but that’s simply because I’m a designer/developer. FF, Chrome & Safari all have competitive offerings. It depends on the end user. I hope it remains competitive.
Nobody can acquire MoCo. Its stock is wholly owned by Mozilla Foundation, and they aren’t about to sell.
I would say that Chrome is targeting browser players on the field.
However One thing you could do with firefox’s codebase is to use it to develop other applications (as an engine, the gecko engine) which chrome seems not to be contributing a lot back to webkit as an engine.
mozilla is not selling.
Is it me, or you also have Firefox crashing with GMail a lot lately. Almost like a boycot from GMail to Firefox.
Don’t be evil my ….
True.. Awefully slow too! whenever it works on firefox that is.
Good they put attention on userscripts, and native support it’s just awesome.
It’s neat that userscripts are so easy to install, but yeah, so far only a couple have worked out of the ones I’ve tried unfortunately. And I’m using one of the latest dev builds.
Same results here. Some scripts can be replaced with an iMacros macro, which is now available for Chrome, too!
I’d still like to see a login screen inside of chrome, making it possible to log in on any computer and have all your bookmarks, passwords and favorites right where you left them. Right now the synchronisation is a step forward but it still doesn’t allow quick:”Oh I’ll just look through my bookmarks” feeling on another computer (that isn’t yours)
Like Chrome OS?
@Yoshua: Sounds like that would be a huge security hole. You do know how hard it is to delete all trace of information from a computer, once it’s been downloaded there?
at first this looked like a great idea, but then i thought that if it allows for hacking/circumvention where i can then compromise a user and steal data then no go. the evil part of me is all for something like this but i think there will be security problems.
NIce to see grease monky in chrome.
and now Google is blocking the ad blocking extensions from showing up in the most popular chrome extension lists: http://www.geektechnica.com/2010/02/google-removes-ad-blocking-extensions-from-extension-gallery-front-page/
didn’t see that one coming…
Adblock is still #1 for me and Adthwart is in the top 10
But do you trust Google?
yes.
NO!
A big NO!!!
yupperz.
I originally wrote StayFocusd (my Chrome extension, shameless plug: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji) as a Greasemonkey script to be installed natively in Chrome.
It worked perfectly, but building it as an actual Chrome extension gave it access to more functionality in the browser: an icon, a popup, a background script (which allows the extension to maintain state across multiple tabs and windows), etc.
So, while Greasemonkey scripts will technically work, many of them will be better for their users if they are upgraded or rewritten as real extensions.
For years google says that they “Support” open source and today we see that they now have no issues with eating their youth.
Not 5 years ago if MS had done the same thing many would be up in arms.
Its time to take off the rose colored glasses
@bruce wayne:
I’m up in arms a long time ago
http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2009/12/14/the-internet-is-becoming-the-googlenet/
I really dislike how people always forget about Opera. It supported Greasemoney-like scripts before Greasemonkey even existed. It’s called User JavaScript in Opera, and is somewhat Greasemoney compatible.
I would say Mozilla had it coming. Considering the effort they put into Personas (for 3.6), Weave and Jetpack, they could have already integrated Greasemonkey, Stylish, AdblockPlus, NoScript, iMacros etc into Firefox 3-3.6 or atleast provided better back-end support.
Seriously, with Opera 10.5 under development Firefox is now the slowest major browser and they concentrate on Personas just because Chrome has a similar feature.
Even now, they could form an official extension team integrating these developers and paying them part-time for the effort these people put in to make Firefox a better browser.
Mozilla takes extensions and extension developers for granted; else the talk of stopping support for the extension framework would never have arisen.
Ubiquity was another promising feature for 3.7-4.0, but that was put on back burner, until Google adds it into Chrome. The same thing happened with Out of Process Plugins and Tabs, when there was talk of developing it for 3.5, but was ditched a short time later. Now after IE8 and Chrome added Per-Tab-Process support, they have started working on it. Looks like it will be ready only in 2011; considering their Product Management Skills it will be full of bugs or suboptimal performance like Places and Tracemonkey.
Sorry about the long rant.
I love Firefox! I hate Mozilla!
Honestly, Chrome is not good enough for me. Agree it’s fast on JS intensive pages. But encounter issues too regularly to ignore. I knowingly got into Dev Channel and this rant may be unwarranted. But Chrome for Linux is seriously buggy. How about dropdowns not listing contents? How about almost every page with Flash crashes? These things has been fixed very recently.
Please don’t compare Chrome extensions to Firefox extensions. Firefox extensions are more powerful and can integrate very well within the browser and run in background. But comparing that 99% of the Chrome extensions are of type, where you click the extension and it loads a frame in the browser.Really? Agree there are some extensions that are good but those are available in very low numbers and noway equivalent to Firefox extensions.
Used Chrome for 2 months both in Windows 7 and Ubuntu and loved it for may be the first week. Then all its shortcomings made me to switch to Firefox and now I’m happy with my Firefox.
Let me say this, its tough to beat Firefox + Ubiquity + Weave + Personas + Jetpack + Greasemonkey + Adblock. Moreover it is already proven, Firefox consumes the lowest memory when run with extensions. Way 2 go Firefox!! Lets beat Chrome!!