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October 20, 2008 6:58 AM PDT

Tweaker alert: Greasemonkey coming to Chrome

by Stephen Shankland

Greasemonkey, a Firefox customization tool popular among high-powered Web surfers, is coming to Google Chrome browser.

Aaron Boodman, a Greasemonkey author and a Google programmer who's active in the Gears project, contributed Greasemonkey support to Chrome, and the Google Operating System blog picked up on the change.

At this stage, enabling Greasemonkey requires people to use a cutting-edge developer version of the open-source browser and to launch it with a "--enable-greasemonkey" option set.

Greasemonkey lets people run scripts that modify Web page appearance. For example, back when Google's Gmail service lacked a "delete" button, people could add one by installing the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox then downloading a particular customization script.

Google wants to improve the Greasemonkey support, for example by confining particular Greasemonkey scripts to particular Web pages and letting the browser update its scripts as it's running.

Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank.
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by bdaughtry October 20, 2008 7:32 AM PDT
Personally, I'd rather have AdBlock Plus.
Reply to this comment
by mjconver October 20, 2008 10:03 AM PDT
Yep, me too. No Adblock == No Chrome.
by rossstock October 20, 2008 8:14 AM PDT
Great news!

PS -- Where I come from , a "Tweaker" is someone who is addicted to crank/meth ... they usually are found under hoods of sweatshirts, riding a stolen bike with a dog in tow ... I don't know how many of them use Google Chrome.
Reply to this comment
by warpsix October 20, 2008 8:58 AM PDT
So that is why they added a non-removable home tab to my igoogle page, just so i would have to install this tool to remove it
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