Tampermonkey for Firefox released
The author of Tampermonkey, a popular script loader for Chromium-based web browsers, has released a beta port of the add-on for the Firefox web browser.
The browser extension is only compatible with Firefox 46 and newer at the time of writing (the current stable version of Firefox is version 44.0.1). If things go as planned, Firefox 46 will be released to the stable channel on April 19, 2016.
Tampermonkey is a userscript manager which makes the handling of userscripts easier after it has been installed.
Just like Greasemonkey, it will pick up installation requests on sites like Greasyfork that act as repositories for scripts.
Tampermonkey for Firefox
Tampermonkey displays a dialog when you click on an install link highlighting information about the script that you are about to install (taken from the script itself), a warning message about malicious scripts and their potential impact, the includes (the sites it will work on), and the source code of the script.
It is a good idea to review these before you hit the install button on the page to make sure the script is not malicious.
The script is added to the Firefox browser if you hit install. You manage all installed scripts using Tampermonkey. The extension lists each scripts in its interface and highlights information suich as the supported sites, version, features and links as well.
You may use the manager to remove scripts but also to leave comments or visit the script homepage on the Internet (if the information is provided).
Another option that you have is to edit a script directly using Tampermonkey. This can be useful if you want to change the supported sites, or change the code of a script directly.
New scripts can be added manually to Tampermonkey as well, for instance by copying and pasting script content into the editor, or writing a script from scratch.
The toolbar button the extension adds on installation lists several important information including the scripts that run on the active page.
The interface opens with a serious delay currently but things like these are to be expected from a beta release, especially one that is released for a new add-on environment.
A comparison of the Chrome version of Tampermonkey with the newly released Firefox version shows that both share the same feature set with only minor differences.
The Chrome version offers better performance currently though, but that is likely going to change in the future.
Closing Words
The release of Tampermonkey for Firefox is a welcome addition even though it needs to be optimized to fix the performance issues that it ships with currently.
Now you: Do you use userscripts?
Martin, can any of the script loaders for Firefox run scripts before the page loads? Opera used to have this feature, and I thought Scriptish did but it seems not?
This addon not work, because Webextensions on Firefox is not ready yet. Look on site http://arewewebextensionsyet.com/ Bugs, bugs and bugs
In someway, I do not like those badly-written script language or codes, which would make the browser unresponsive. As for security, it’s yet another long story.
And why should I use this instead of greasemonkey?
GreasyMonkey is still under development, they ‘often’ release beta versions but in this article it’s unclear wahat are the benefits over existent solutions like skipfish and greasymonkey.
So if any1 tried this and can tell me something about it, it would be nice. :)
Where can I find nice useful scripts to run with Tampermonkey ?
I always prefer my monkeys greased .. don’t ask!
Well then don’t throw it out there ;)
Martin, the article is not much useful (apart from just notifying that there is TamperMonkey for Firefox now) without a comparison with the existing alternative(s).
I tried to find a recent comparison but there does not seem to be one.
Greasemonkey is working fine for me. I tried Scriptish a while back, as it was superior in some ways, but struck a compatibility issue, so back to Greasemonkey.
This. I prefer Scriptish really but it isn’t maintained anymore and some scripts don’t work.
As I remember, Scriptish can load scripts like Opera, while Greasemonkey used to load scripts last. I’m not sure if this is still the case for Greasemonkey. It was said that the features of Scriptish would eventually be backported.
Does it provide some features that greasemonkey lacks?
Greasemonkey project is still alive, right? No new updates since Nov2015, but I see ongoing activity here https://github.com/greasemonkey/greasemonkey/issues
It’s still alive. You can get latest betas from AMO:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/versions/beta
Latest beta was released two weeks ago.
What should be mentioned is that it was ported as a WebExtension