Diving into GreaseMonkey

In the recent past, I came across the GreaseMonkey (hereafter GM) jargon multiple times. I didn't immediately throw myself into the investigation of finding out what it is and what it does. Probably the reason being that it is a scripting extension and I have an aversion towards scripting.

With the advent of Google and Yahoo maps and their bitter fight to establish their mapping service, there had been lot of talk going around about GM scripts. For instance the Craigs List webpages can be overlayed with Yahoo maps using GM scripts. Ah.. two web services are integrated using GM script! This really kindled my interests in GM.

GreaseMonkey extension provides a scripting option through javascripts to make changes to webpages. There are lot more you can do with GM. Dive Into GM is a excellent site that provides enough insight into GM and the scripts that you can write using GM. The only caveat with GM is that this extension is only for Firefox and is not supported in other Mozilla clones.

I had no intentions of stopping here. To try my hand, I wrote a small GM script for the Bug DB report that we have in our office. The report is a plain black and white html report. With GM script I have color coded the report based on the severity of the bug. It really improves the usability of the report. Just scan through the bug report you can get a feel of hot and cold bugs.

I least expected this utility to be appreciated. But on the contrary it was well received by enthusiastic firefox users.

Since our Bug DB being an internal tool, the GM script that I wrote has very less significance to be posted to whole internet community. If you are interested do drop me a note in the comments section.