Chrome 4 gets native user script support

Feb 2, 2010 09:13 GMT  ·  By

Google Chrome introduced official extension support in December and things kicked off to a good start. There are a few thousands extensions in the online gallery now, some with hundreds of thousands of installs. And with support coming to the stable version of Chrome 4 things looked promising. Yet, Firefox still had the upper hand with a huge collection of add-ons thanks to a head-start of a few years. Its advantage has just gotten smaller though, as Chrome just got native support for Greasemonkey scripts enabled in all builds.

"Google Chrome 4 now natively supports Greasemonkey user scripts. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension I wrote in 2004 that allows developers to customize web pages using simple JavaScript and it was the inspiration for some important parts of our extension system," Aaron Boodman, the creator of Greasemonkey and a Google software engineer, wrote.

"Ever since the beginning of the Chromium project, friends and coworkers have been asking me to add support for user scripts in Google Chrome. I'm happy to report that as of the last Google Chrome release, you can install any user script with a single click," he added.

Some support for Greasemonkey scripts has been built into Chrome for a while now, but the feature is currently fully supported across all Chrome releases. Greasemonkey scripts are just JavaScript extensions used to modify the behavior and look of certain sites or web apps. Some have become quite popular, but so far they have been exclusive to Firefox.

Not anymore, you don't even need an add-on in Chrome, Greasemonkey support is built-in, eliminating some of the hassle of installing a user script. It gets better, Greasemonkey scripts are automatically converted into Chrome extensions, which are also built with JavaScript, making the conversion possible, so you can manage them just like any of the native extensions.

What this means is that Chrome just got 40,000 new extensions in one fell swoop. Boodman warns that not all Greasemonkey scripts will work as some may be built specifically for Firefox. However, about 75 to 85 percent of them should work fine, Boodman says. Of course, with slight modifications, many of those that don't currently work can be adjusted for Google Chrome as well. All the scripts work in Firefox already, so Google's browser isn't really gaining any ground, but it's still a big step for Chrome.

Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.