Run Greasemonkey Scripts in Google’s Chrome Browser
What’s a browser without Greasemonkey? It’s a sad little thing that can’t do any of the cool stuff that Greasemonkey enables. You would think Google of all companies would have baked Greasemonkey support into its new Chrome web browser — after all, GMail has an official API for Greasemonkey — but so far anyway, Chrome doesn’t support scripts.
However that didn’t stop developer Kazuho Oku from releasing Greasemetal, an awkward, but largely functional, way of running (some) Greasemonkey scripts in Chrome. Because Chrome does not yet offer a way to develop browser add-ons, Greasemetal has to run as a separate application.
To use it, you need to install Greasemetal and then launch the app, which will in turn launch Chrome. According to Oku, Greasemetal “modifies the behavior of Google Chrome using an inter-process communication channel called AutomationProxy, which is used for automatically testing the functions of the web browser.”
Once you have Greasemetal running you can add scripts to the userjs directory under your My Documents folder (or Documents folder on Windows Visa).
Yes, it is a bit awkward and convoluted, but if you’re craving Greasemonkey in Chrome, this is your best bet (until Google creates an interface for Chrome plugins).
A word of caution though, not every Greasemonkey script is going to work in Greasemetal. Oku recommends sticking to scripts that work with the Opera or Safari implementations of Greasemonkey, which narrows the field somewhat. I was able to get on of Oku’s suggestions, oAutoPagerize, to work in Greasemetal, but regrettably none of the Gmail scripts I use seemed to work out of the box.
[via Read/Write Web]
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