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Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

On a more general note: Do you guys find Greasemonkey useful? I mean, really. I know the concept, and I also installed the extension several times, found some cool scripts...but after some time I always felt it is not worth the effort...the times spent fiddling with it wasn't adequate to the benefits, and after some time I returned to the old ways and found that I can browse the web without it just the same.

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I just found a single thing that I could not have done in any other way and it was invaluable.

I hope to score with this so I'm not going to lift the veil further, but in a couple of days I'll do a posting on it.

Greasemonkey has some really good uses. (and some really evil ones! Be very careful before you install greasemonkey scripts, always inspect the source to make sure you don't pick up malware and never install a greasemonkey script that does external imports or that attempts to augment the document with stuff that will load javascript from external sources).

I use it all the time. I have a handful of scripts that I use to tweak a bunch of sites I spend a lot of time on, including one for blacklisting some annoying folks here on HN:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/55745

Me too! Blocking posts of annoying people is the killer application for GreaseMonkey.

I think it would be a lot more useful if it were easier to discover new scripts (I'm on a site, show me what scripts are available here), and if those scripts could expose reusable components with API's - say, someone could write a parsing component that would provide neat API to news.YC ;)

http://lifehacker.com/5111431/greasefire-finds-greasemonkey-...

> someone could write a parsing component that would

That's what @require is for.

I am a big reader of Metafilter and stumbling across a couple of greasemonkey scripts has made the experience significantly better. I haven't written my own scripts, but in these "fill in the gaps" situations it can be invaluable.

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