Super GreaseMonkey – your favorite Firefox plugin meets jQuery

Technology

Along with Firebug, GreaseMonkey remains one of the best Firefox extensions, giving the browser capabilities that Safari, IE, and Chrome still can’t compete with. It gives you the ability to easily write your own custom features for Firefox in Javascript, letting you customize the way content renders and executes on any website you visit.

Super GreaseMonkey is a slight modification of the plugin that provides built-in jQuery support. With this addition, you can get done in a single line of code what might have taken 20. Most GreaseMonkey scripts work by searching for specific tags, classes, or IDs in a page structure and then altering their contents. Traversing the DOM is a lot of work in standard Javascript, but it’s completely painless in jQuery, making this feature a must have for regular GreaseMonkey scripters.

Because it’s a modification of the standard GreaseMoney install, Super GreaseMonkey may be a version or two behind the latest release. Also, it’s not currently the plugin that most people are using, which is important if you want others to use your scripts. Fortunately, you can also get jQuery to work with the standard GreaseMonkey install by manually embedding jQuery into your scripts. It’s only marginally more work, and will ensure that your script will work with other GreaseMonkey users. InternetDuctTape describes a few options for making this work, but the best recommendation is to download a packed version of the jQuery library and paste it right at the top of your script.

Super GreaseMonkey
InternetDuctTape – Using jQuery With Standard Greasemonkey

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I'm a tinkerer and finally reached the point where I fix more things than I break. When I'm not tinkering, I'm probably editing a book for Maker Media.

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