YouTube's HTML5 player is great, but it's not enabled for all the videos. Even if you go to youtube.com/html5 and join the HTML5 trial, you'll find a lot of videos that use the Flash player. "Some videos with ads are not yet supported (they will play in the Flash player)," mentions the site.

There's a simple Greasemonkey script that forces YouTube to use the HTML5 player for almost all the videos you watch at youtube.com. You need to install Greasemonkey if you use Firefox or Tampermonkey if you use Chrome, then click the "Install" button here.

[Update (Octomber 3rd, 2013): For Chrome, use the old version from Sept 23.]

The script works better in Firefox. If you install the script in Chrome, it will disable the new Ajax interface, but everything else seems to work well.


Here's a video you can use to test the script. Please note that the script doesn't work for embedded videos.

Google Music Lyrics is a Greasemonkey script that adds a lyrics panel to Google Music. It only works in Firefox and there's a single lyrics provider: SongLyrics.com.


The lyrics are cached so that they're displayed instantly the next time you play the same song. You can also edit the lyrics and the changes are saved using HTML5 local storage. To hide the panel, click the title.

Chris Hendry, who developed the script, plans to add other lyrics providers, allow users to import and export lyrics and to make the script work in Google Chrome.

If you like Google Toolbar's highlighter, but you don't want to install the add-on or the toolbar doesn't support your browser, try the Word Highlight Greasemonkey script. After performing a Google search, the script highlights the keywords and lets you quickly find their occurrences. Click on the arrows displayed next to each keyword to find the next match and use the map to visualize the distribution of the keywords.


My favorite feature is that you can use the word highlighter even when you're not searching the web. Press Ctrl+/, type the keywords and the script will highlight them.

The script can be installed in Firefox (it requires Greasemonkey), Chrome 4 Beta, Opera, Safari (it requires GreaseKit).

If you don't like the fade-in animation from Google's homepage and you want the old homepage, one option is to disable JavaScript. Google will no longer hide navigation elements, but you won't be able to use many web apps that require JavaScript.

Another option is to install a Greasemonkey script that disables the animation. The script requires Greasemonkey if you use Firefox and GreaseKit for Safari.

You can also add the script in Opera if you follow this guide. Chrome users can install the script if they switch to the dev channel.

If you still use Internet Explorer, install IE7Pro, save the script, rename it to nogooglefade.ieuser.js and copy the script to C:\Program Files\IEPro\userscripts. Enable the script in IE7Pro's settings.



Update: Google Chrome users should install this extension to disable Google's animation.

Google Docs Viewer is a handy way to view PDF, PPT and TIFF files online, without having to install plug-ins or additional applications. Unfortunately, Google didn't make it easy to use the viewer without having to manually generate URLs.

A Greasemonkey script automates the process by replacing all the links to PDF, PPT and TIFF files from a page with links to Google's document viewer. To use the script, you need to install Greasemonkey in Firefox or use a dev build of Google Chrome. It should also work in Opera, Safari + GreaseKit and Internet Explorer + IE7Pro.


Hopefully, the future versions of Firefox, Chrome and other browsers will allow users to associate content types with web services, so that you can open KML files in Google Maps, iCal files in Google Calendar or Microsoft Office files in Google Docs.

If you like one of the many doodles used by Google to commemorate holidays and events, why not personalize Google's homepage and replace the standard logo with your favorite doodle? A Greasemonkey script created by the Google employee Tiffany Lane will help you pick a doodle from this page and make it sticky.

"By default the script will override your favorite doodle on holidays or any days with a special doodle (personally, I never want to miss a new doodle on the Google homepage). After the holiday is over, your favorite doodle will be back. However, you can change this preference so that your favorite is always shown," mentions the author.

Unfortunately, the script is quite complex and it only works in Firefox, assuming you've installed the Greasemonkey extension.


For iGoogle users, there's a gadget that lets you pick "one of the past Google holiday logos to sit atop your page, or have it cycle through them randomly".

{ via Search Engine Land }

If you don't like Google's new search box and you think the font size is way too big, there's a Greasemonkey script that brings back the old interface. I've tested the script in Firefox and Google Chrome, so you should try it if you use one of these browsers.

In Firefox, you need to install the Greasemonkey extension, restart the browser and then install the script. If you use Google Chrome Dev Channel or a recent Chromium build, follow these instructions and copy the script to the User Scripts directory.

From:


... back to:


{ Thanks, Anon. }

Google's search results pages haven't changed that much over time and most of the changes were subtle. An useful feature that has been removed was a list of competing search engines you could use if Google's results weren't very good. Here's an example from 2001:

"Try your query on: AltaVista Excite Google Groups (Deja) HotBot Lycos Yahoo!"


But Google's results have improved, the number of competing search engines has decreased and the list had to be updated frequently, so Google decided to remove the feature. Some add-ons have revived the feature: Customize Google is the most popular, but my favorite implementation is the Greasemonkey script "Try this search on", which lets you switch between different search engines.

Google's Matt Cutts had the idea to bring back the old feature as close to the original as possible and Tiffany Lane, another Google engineer, developed Retro Links, a Greasemonkey script that lists some alternative search engines at the bottom of the search results page. The list is customizable and you can choose between 42 services: Yahoo, Live Search, Flickr, Wikipedia, Gmail and many others.


I think it would be interesting if Google started to suggest third-party search engines that could provide useful results for your queries, based on your search history, location and relevance. In some cases, Google could even display results from other sites in some special OneBoxes: Flickr results sorted by "interestingness", Delicious bookmarks sorted by popularity, Twitter posts that are related to recent events etc.

Someone sent me the link to a document published using Google Docs, but I didn't have the permission to edit the document. I wanted to save the document to my Google Docs account, but none of the options offered by Google allowed me to do that.

One of the ways you could create a duplicate for the document is to replace

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=AAAAA

with

http://docs.google.com/DocAction?action=copy&docid=AAAAA

where AAAAA is the document ID.

To automate the process, I created a small user script that adds an option to duplicate the document. The script works in:

* Firefox, if you install Greasemonkey
* Chrome, if you install the latest pre-beta version
* Opera (no add-on required)
* Safari, if you install GreaseKit
* Internet Explorer, but you need to install a plug-in like IE7Pro

Here's a sample document to try it. After installing the script, open the document, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Copy to my account".


Another idea is to upload the document to Google Docs, but you need to edit the URL to remove the footer and add the .html extension. Replace

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=AAAAA

with

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=AAAAA&hgd=1&.html

Related:
Download published documents and spreadsheets
Tips for linking to Google presentations

Google Cache Mapper is a Greasemonkey script that enhances Google's cached pages by adding a virtual scrollbar with all the matches of your keywords. Google highlights your search terms using different colors and this script shows the position of the matches. The virtual scrollbar is clickable and it shows snippets for each match of your search terms.


Google Chrome has a similar scrollbar that uses yellow markers to locate the matches for the "find in page" feature.

The user script requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.

Related:
Browsing the web using Google Cache

Google SearchWiki lets you customize the search results by promoting, demoting and adding new pages. You can also annotate the results. Some people think that the new feature clutters Google's clean search results, without bringing too much functionality.

Google doesn't offer a way to turn off SearchWiki other than logging out from your Google account, but you can install a Greasemonkey script that hides the interface for this additional functionality. If you use Firefox, install Greasemonkey extension, restart the browser and the add the No SearchWiki script. Google's search results will look clean again, even if you are logged in.


The script also works in Opera, which has built-in support for userscripts. Just go to Tools>Preferences>Advanced>Content>JavaScript Options, choose a folder in the "User JavaScript files" box and then save the script in that folder.

Note that the script doesn't disable the SearchWiki interface for the results you've already promoted so you can restore their default position and you can still see the removed results at the bottom of the page. To undo your changes, you can use My SearchWiki Notes page.

Update: You can now disable SearchWiki from Google's preferences page.

A recent build of Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome, added support for user scripts. For now, the support is limited: Chromium reads the scripts from the hard-coded directory c:\scripts and it ignores the @include metadata which restricts scripts to one or more web addresses. To enable Greasemonkey support, you need to use the flag: --enable-greasemonkey, for example by appending it to the target of a shortcut.

I tested the Greasemonkey support with the old script Linkifier, which turns text URLs and email addresses into links.


The new feature has been contributed by Aaron Boodman, the creator of the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, who happens to work at Google.

In September, Google's Sundar Pichai said that Chrome will have an API for extensions. "We don't have that in the beta today, but we definitely plan an extension API. It is one of the things we will get to next." It seems that Google Chrome will provide native support for Greasemonkey scripts before releasing the API.

Tips:
* to get early access to developer-oriented Google Chrome builds, subscribe to the Dev Channel and read the release notes.
* the latest Chromium snapshots are available at the BuildBot site, but they don't support Google's auto-updater and they're less stable than the official releases. You only need to download the file chrome-win32.zip from the most recent folder.

Google Notebook provides options to export each notebook as HTML or in the Atom format, but it's not very easy to export all your data. A Greasemonkey script automates the tedious work by reformatting the mobile page and adding links to the HTML or Atom version of each notebook.

The default format is Atom and you should use it if you want to edit the notebooks on your computer and then import the files to Google Notebook. It's a good idea to use the HTML format for archiving your notebooks.

This script requires Firefox, Greasemonkey extension and a download manager like DownThemAll that saves all the files linked from a page or some of them.


After clicking on "Export notebooks", right-click and select "DownThemAll!". Choose a folder where to save the files, type nbid in the "Fast filtering" box and click on "Start".


Peter Shafer wrote a similar script for exporting Google Docs documents.

GmailAgenda is a Greasemonkey script that shows your Google Calendar agenda as a sidebar in Gmail. The script uses Google Calendar's embedded view and it includes an option to add events to the main calendar. The sidebar can't be minimized, so it remains visible even when you don't need it.


An alternative way to keep an eye on the Google Calendar agenda is to add the iGoogle gadget in the sidebar, as explained in this post. The advantages are that you don't need the Greasemonkey extension, the sidebar is visible even when you don't visit Gmail and it can be closed.

If you use Gmail, many Google services have access to your contacts list and you can easily add addresses using autocomplete or from a contact picker. But what happens when you need to enter an email address on a site that's not from Google? Many news sites have options to send a link to your friends and sometimes this is more convenient than loading Gmail and pasting a link to the article.

Google Contacts Autocomplete is a Greasemonkey script that brings your Gmail contacts everywhere you go on the web. When you start to type the name of your friend or his email address, the script shows a list of suggestions.


For now, the script only provides suggestions for a single email address, but I'm sure this could be easily fixed. Unlike Gmail, the script sorts the suggestions alphabetically, not by affinity.

If you want to play a YouTube video one more time, there's a "replay" button at the end of the video or you can press the left arrow, after focusing the video.

To automate the process and play the video in an "infinite" loop, use Loopy for YouTube, a Greasemonkey script that adds a small link below the video to start the loop. The script requires Greasemonkey , a Firefox extension, and it's efficient: it doesn't reload the page to download the video again.


There's another way to play a YouTube video in a loop - use the loop parameter of the embeddable player (here's the complete list of parameters):

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1 (replace VIDEOID with the video's ID)

If you add the autoplay parameter, the video will start to play automatically:

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1&autoplay=1

If you ever start to type a comment on a blog and you realize that the textarea is very small and it doesn't have any of the powerful features from your favorite text editor, you should try It's All Text, a Firefox extension that makes the transition between any textarea and your text editor. The extension adds a small Edit button below the textarea that copies the existing text in a temporary file and it launches Notepad or any other text editor installed on your computer. When you save the file, its content is automatically added to the textarea, so you don't have to use copy-paste.


In case you don't need a text editor, but some comment boxes are way too small, this Greasemonkey script lets you resize them, by dragging a small icon. Another good option is to use the Resizeable Textarea Firefox extension. This bookmarklet should work in most browsers, but you need to click on the bookmark before resizing a textarea.


Somebody suggested that every comment box should be a Google Docs-like rich text editor, but until popular blogging engines support tables and image uploading, Flickr Rich Edit adds some simple editing options for those who don't want to type HTML tags. The Greasemonkey script works only for Flickr's comment boxes by default, but you can add the options to any textarea by replacing http://*flickr.com/* with * in the list of included pages.

If you subscribe to all the blogs you found interesting at some point, you end up with a huge list of subscriptions. A possible solution is to reduce the number of items from your reading list using filters like: don't show me the posts from Google Operating System that include "YouTube" in the title. While Google Reader doesn't support filters yet, there are some tools that might help.

Google Reader Filter is a Greasemonkey script that lets you define a list of keywords you're interested in and a list of uninteresting keywords. The script highlights the posts that include your favorite keywords in the title and grays out the posts that contain keywords from the blacklist. You can use regular expressions for defining complex restrictions, like dates or long titles.


The script doesn't remove posts, so it's more like an automatic highlighter. Feed Rinse has another approach: add a feed, define a list of simple rules for filtering and you get a filtered feed that can be added to your feed reader. For some reason, I couldn't subscribe to Feed Rinse's feeds in Google Reader, even though they were valid and any other feed reader accepted them. Hopefully, it's just a temporary problem.


You could also use a Yahoo Pipe that lets you define a list of keywords that are potentially interesting. So if you enter gmail, google calendar as a filter, the pipe will obtain a list of posts that contain Gmail or Google Calendar. After running the pipe, click on "More options", select "Get as RSS" and subscribe to the feed. As Yahoo doesn't allow you to change the feed's title, you should rename it in Google Reader.

If you want to see a music video, there's a good chance you'll find it on YouTube. The downside is that YouTube doesn't offer any music-related feature, so you can't find information about the artists, lyrics or concert dates.

A simple Greasemonkey script adds one of these missing feature: lyrics. The script creates a container titled "Lyrics" below the video's description and shows the lyrics when you expand the container. Obviously, the video must contain the artist's name and the song's title. If the script doesn't find the lyrics of a song, change the site that provides lyrics or choose from one the alternatives.

As usually, to install this script you need Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.

Google Reader Subscribers Count is a discreet Greasemonkey script that shows the number of Google subscribers to a site's feeds. The number is overlayed at the bottom of each page that has feeds and it's one of the ways you can measure the popularity of a site. If you click on the number, you can subscribe to the feed.

As usually, the script requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension, although it could also work in other browsers. A related script is Google Reader Subscribe Button, which shows if you've subscribed to a feed and lets you subscribe to it in Google Reader. It would be interesting to combine the two scripts.