Hello,
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. So, you can make on-the-fly changes to the HTML web pages. Greasemonkey can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/748 or you can simply Google (or Bing) it. Install it and then you will find an entry of it under Tools menu in the Firefox’s menu bar.
Fig. 1
Searching over the web, you can come across many repositories of scripts. The script file can be a remote file or a local file. The script used is ECMAscript.
<GooadNews>ECMA script = JavaScript</GoodNews>
ECMA script is the official name for JavaScript. As in fig. 1, you can create your own script. Tool > Greasemonkey> New User Script will open a new window asking about the basic information about the script.
Fig. 2
Name: The name of your script i.e. the user script.
Includes: The URLs of the webpages which you expect the script to act over.
OK for the first time will prompt you for selecting the Text Editor. You can use Gedit (/usr/bin/gedit) or Notepad (Installation_drive:\Windows\notepad.exe) for editing.
Fig. 3
The name for the script is “Hello World” and it will act over http://www.google.co.in/* webpage. OK will open the text editor with some auto-generated comments.
Fig. 4
As mentioned earlier, it’s all JavaScript. The name of file containing the script must end in “user.js” (hello_world.user.js).
alert(‘Hello, World!’);
Fig. 5
You are, now, ready with your first user-script. Type http://www.google.co.in in your Firefox browser to see the alert.
Fig. 6
Script is executed on the DOMContentLoaded event of the browser over that webpage. The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. A web browser is not obliged to use DOM in order to render an HTML document. However, the DOM is required by JavaScript scripts that wish to inspect or modify a web page dynamically. In other words, the Document Object Model is the way JavaScript sees its containing HTML page and browser state.
Trying the fun part of it!!
Write a new script window.location=’http://www.twitter.com’ and write “http://www.facebook.com” in the include section. With this, whenever there’s a Facebook link, you will always get redirected to Twitter.
Here’s a script for downloading YouTube’s videos: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1Hlmy2IbEk44-mI4IKpzJQ8HCJLzdgvW5binwP-_fLOI .
Fig. 7
Scripting languages always execute within the sandbox of the web browser. So, don’t raise your expectations. But, you can surely make the web-pages more interactive.
