This is an old post, which I’ll just publish, in the light of the increasing Greasemonkey adoption. An example of amazing Wikipedia usage. Yes, it’s the animate the diff list. Very fancy.
Here, the old text:
This thing started with me bashing a perfectly usable, but not perfect, website. I named names, being a complete asshole, which was far from my intention. Here, instead, is a gentler fix. This text aims to relieve the symptoms if not the root of the disease, which is non-standard markup. First, let’s assume you already use Mozilla Firefox. It is released in 1.0, and it is the least broken browser on the market.
Aim of the exercise: “Be able to set User CSS for a list of sites.” [Author’s note: Why didn’t I just think of using Chris Pedrick’s Web Developer Toolbar? It has that feature. And now I’m using it.]
OK, the place to start looking for extensions is, of course, the repository for Firefox extensions, Mozdev.org. Over at mozdev.org’s top50 is a list of the most popular extensions.
Greasemonkey: lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any webpage to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a webpage’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a webpage’s design or interaction.
Interesting, adding some behaviour to pages… Whoa! They said it! There is the link thing, the Thing, the Thing! (Add snazzy dance here.) OK, there is documentation for the browser I’m using. Fascinating!
Hm, interesting, Mozilla.org timed out twice on me. (Idea: **Websites We Trust that do not respond** is a *trouble indicator* you could use in fiction, or in RPGs.) [Author’s note: But everyone would blame their local ISP. No drama.]
Anyway.