Revolutionize your browsing on Firefox for Android with Tampermonkey
When Mozilla launched Firefox 110 for Android earlier this week, it introduced support for a few new add-ons. The three new add-ons, Tampermonkey, Read Aloud, and ClearURLs, are all available via the add-ons page in the mobile browser.
Tampermonkey is an interesting addition to Firefox, as it unlocks the ability to run userscripts on sites. Userscripts are small snippets of code that may remove, change or add features to websites. What makes this especially powerful in Firefox for Android is that Mozilla limited add-ons in the stable version of the browser. With userscripts, Firefox users may enable functionality that is not provided by one of the few add-ons that are supported officially.
Tampermonkey was released in 2016 for Firefox initially, but Firefox users had access to Greasemonkey prior to that to use userscripts.
Tampermonkey in Firefox for Android
Installation of Tampermonkey is straightforward, provided that Firefox 110 or newer is installed on the Android device.
Select Menu > Add-ons > Add-ons Manager to display the list of available add-ons. Locate Tampermonkey on the page and activate the plus icon next to it. Firefox for Android displays the permissions that it requires. Select add to install the extension and then "okay, got it" once it is installed to complete the process.
Select Menu > Add-ons > Tampermonkey to display the main dashboard. It is a bit tiny on the screen, as it does not appear to be optimized for smaller screens.
Most users may want to select "find new scripts" on the page to search scripts and install them. There is also an option to create a script from scratch, and to manage existing scripts.
Find new scripts opens this page on the Tampermonkey website in Firefox. It lists several script repositories and includes a search at the top to find specific scripts. Type a site name or purpose, e.g., YouTube, Twitter, or download, and all matching scripts are returned.
Installation works similar to Tampermonkey on the desktop, but you may get an error, even though scripts install fine.
Most scripts are designed to run on specific sites. Download scripts, for example, may display buttons or links to download content from sites. Some scripts may work a tad different when installed on Firefox for Android. A test installation of a download script for instance caused a popular video streaming site to display an error message on first load. A refresh of the page resolved it, and download links were displayed then on the page. Downloads worked fine then as well.
Closing Words
Tampermonkey support adds a treasure trove of possibilities to Firefox for Android. Installation of scripts and usage of scripts is a bit cumbersome, especially if errors are encountered. There is also the requirement of checking scripts to make sure that they are safe to use, which is a bit less comfortable on smaller screens.
All in all though, it is a welcome addition to stable versions of the Firefox web browser.
Now You: do you use userscripts in your browsers?
I saw someone mentioned Iceraven for Android. I don’t like Firefox on Windows PC, is there something similar to Iceraven for Windows PC?
I should mentioned that FireMonkey does not support all GM3 scripts.
Now would also be a good time to share some great userscripts.
Are Tampermonkey and Geasemonkey safe to use?
I think I read in the past there were security concerns with Geasemonkey.
I don’t recall anyone complaining about Greasemonkey but I do remember people complaining about ViolentMonkey and TamperMonkey.
FireMonkey is also pretty reasonable too.
I want to install all extensions without limitations!
What’s the sense of upgrading to a newer version if you lose the extensions you had and can’t reinstall the extensions?
Personally, I think it’s best not to upgrade unless you can install all extensions I had without limitations.
As an advanced user, I welcome the opportunity to install all extensions.
about:config needs to be unblocked to modify settings.
Currently, about:config is blocked in the address bar, but not blocked in the nightly versions: that’s a bug!
Mozilla, please reconsider my suggestions.
The problem with Firefox for Android is that it’s a battery killer. Even with uBlock and the like, it chews up your battery fast.
Fennec (with custom add-on collection support) is where it’s at.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/p7mgec/guide_using_most_all_firefox_addons_on_fennec_on/
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/howto-beliebige-add-ons-in-fennec-auf-android-installieren/
These new add-ons are now also available on the Mull browser…
I’ve just enabled ClearURLs!
Hopefully Violentmonkey will be next because it’s open source. Tampermonkey is not.
Is there any reason anyone would want to visit youtube directly in a mobile browser and use a tampermonkey script to download a video instead of just using the newpipe app? Cause I can’t think of any.
+1
No device running Android here (no smartphone), yet when the article mentions,
“When Mozilla launched Firefox 110 for Android earlier this week, it introduced support for a few new add-ons.”
Is Violentmonkey, userscript manager as well, among those? I do hope so because as far as I know and can remember Tampermonkey is closely tied to Google, unless things have changed since I had tested it. I found it moreover cumbersome to use compared to ViolentMonkey. I’m surprised Mozilla has added support for Tampermonkey on Firefox 110 for Android, unless of course the usercript manager is now cleaner than it was.
Violentmonkey, and Tampermoney for that matter, are both available on Iceraven, which is a fork of Firefox stable that includes a large collection of recommended add-ons by default (Hamburger menu>Add-ons) that you only need to click the “+” next to each to enable.
Same goes for LocalCDN and Decentraleyes. They’re both there. You pick which one you want to use, or you can use neither.
No switching to less stable versions of the browser, creating Mozilla accounts to make a list on their website, or any secret codes involving clicking on logos three times and such required.
If you need something not in Iceraven’s extended list, can request it on their GitHub, or swap out Iceraven’s default add-ons list for your own if you want to create one the way people do for their Nightly browser. Most people don’t feel the need to- Iceraven has like 50 or 100 add-ons available, which cover most of the popular ones that are compatible with current Android browsers and even a few that aren’t! :) The ones that aren’t don’t work, obviously, but you’re free to try them.
This is where Iceraven’s latest releases can be downloaded:
https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser/releases
I’ve been using it since it started way back when Firefox 69 was released.
That version of Firefox created a lot of issues with Firefox for Android that still haven’t been cleaned up years later. Add-ons are just one of them. They went from thousands to seven that day. Now they have, what, 15? More if you agree to test their nightly or beta versions and then go through all these weird steps.
The one thing I like about Firefox for Android these days is that it provides a solid base for Iceraven, which admittedly gets the vast majority of it’s code and the core of it’s updates from them. The difference is that Iceraven adds in options, customizability, and extendability where it can, and tries to show users what their browser is doing in relation to visited websites. It’s a small project and can’t make huge changes in those areas, but even little things like having the option to show full URLs all the time (i.e. “https://” and “www”) are a big deal to me.
That adding those type of things back in only takes a little bit of code tells you that the Mozilla Firefox team doesn’t want users of the stable version to have them. If they did, they could use the Iceraven code (It’s open-source. Firefox brought added in an option for square tabs that was initially based on Iceraven code relatively early in the Firefox 69+ era.) or write their own code to do the same things their own way. They don’t. So, that tells me they don’t want to.
I appreciate that they are there to use as a base for a browser that is more in line with what I’m looking for. That’s not a small thing. It’s just mystifies me why they don’t provide those things themselves the way they did in the Firefox 68 and prior era.
The addition of Tampermonkey isn’t related to it being a superior addon to Violetmonkey but it might be more popular. Same reason Decentraleyes is available and not LocalCDN. For Mozilla in its Android browser it is more about popularity of an addon than its effectiveness.
Main reason why apart from noobs, a bit advanced users use Fennec, Iceraven or any other fork of Firefox because that allows custom add-ons aka addons you actually need.
Comparing,
Privacy policy for Violentmonkey – Add-ons for Firefox (en-US)
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/violentmonkey/privacy/]
Privacy policy for Tampermonkey – Add-ons for Firefox (en-US)
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tampermonkey/privacy/]
The former is limpid, the latter less.
I prefer Violentmonkey, which is open source and you can see the original code before minification.