MakeUseOf » greasemonkey

How To Find Out Who Recently Unfriended You On Facebook

Yaara Lancet — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:00:04 +0000

Facebook lets you do many, many things. Whether you love it or hate it, you can’t deny the fact that it has opened doors to things we previously couldn’t do. But despite its shady reputation regarding anything to do with privacy, there are still some things you can’t do with Facebook.

One of these things, is seeing who deleted you from their friend list. Facebook doesn’t and will probably never let you do that officially. It’s probably true that people deserve the right to unfriend people in privacy, but turning it into such a secret makes the whole thing seem illegitimate. So what if I unfriended someone? People have the right to use Facebook as they see fit, and if someone is hurt because someone else unfriended him, well, that’s tough.

With that in mind, here are two ways to find out who unfriended you on Facebook. Use them wisely. If you don’t think you can handle it, perhaps you are better off not knowing.

Unfriend Finder

Unfriend Finder is a user script that adds some simple functionalities to Facebook. Namely, seeing who unfriended you, and seeing a list of your pending friend requests – another thing Facebook doesn’t officially let you see.

The installation process depends on the browser you’re using (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE are supported). Visit the help section for specific instructions for your browser. For Chrome, you will only have to install an extension. For Firefox, you will have to first install Greasemonkey, and then install the script. After installation, you will see a new menu called “Unfriends”.

When someone unfriends you, a small number will appear next to the menu. You will also get a notification about it (which you can deactivate through the settings).

If you click it, you will access your unfriends list, where you can choose to hide unfriends from the list or leave them there to remember them forever and ever.

Through the new menu, or from the unfriends list, you can also access your pending requests. Here you will find a list of all the people you’ve sent friend requests to, but never replied. You will also be able to see if someone ignored your friend request.

In the settings you can change the script a bit to suit your needs better. For example, you can choose when to get notifications from the script and whether it should show you deactivated and reactivated profiles.

Social Fixer (Better Facebook)

Social Fixer for Facebook (formerly known as Better Facebook), is an all-around Facebook fixer add-on, which does much more than notify you of unfriends. The add-on is compatible with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, and is also available as a Greasemonkey script.

Social Fixer provides lots and lots of options, which you may find useful. For example, you can add sophisticated feed filters, custom themes, tabbed news feed interface and more. But we’ve gathered here for a purpose, and that is to see who unfriended you. Social Fixer offers this as well.

After installing, Social Fixer will run you through an installation wizard. You can go for the recommended settings and install all the options, or choose “Minimalistic Settings” and choose just the features you want.

If you’re only looking to get a small, unobtrusive notification about unfriends, and even Unfriend Finder seems a bit much, browse your way through the wizard until you find the Friend Tracker. Check the box next to it, and continue all the way to the end.

You will now have a Friend Tracker on the right side of your screen, where you’ll be able to see when people unfriend you.

As you can see, Social Fixer warns that sometimes the script is not accurate. For me, however, it performed well. It might do to double check before you call and yell at someone for nothing, though.

If you’re wondering about the wrench that’s suddenly appeared next to your name – that’s just Social Fixer’s settings button.

Bottom Line

Seeing who unfriended you may not be for everybody. Before you install these add-ons, think for a moment: do you really want to know? Is this information really vital to you? If it is, these add-ons are fun and informative. But don’t come complaining to me when you’ve found out things best left unknown!

What do you think? Should people be allowed to see who unfriended them? And are there more ways to do it that you know of? Share in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

How To Restore Sharing Options And Old List Spacing In Google Reader

Yaara Lancet — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:00:10 +0000

Google sure has been busy lately. Gmail has a brand new look, Google+ received some new add-ons and even YouTube is getting a facelift. But did you notice the changes to Google Reader? If you’re a regular user, you must have noticed how the color scheme changed, how the spacing changed in list mode, and to top it all off, that you can’t share items anymore, unless you use Google+.

As opposed to Gmail, where you can control the spacing between items in the new look, no such option has been added to Google Reader. This means your screen is now less utilized and you can see less items in your feed, just because of added padding. And if you were used to sharing items via Reader’s sharing options, they no longer exists. The only way to share is via Google+. So what are avid Google Reader users to do?

Here are two add-ons that will help you restore some of these features and get your good old Reader back.

Reader Sharer [Chrome]

Reader Sharer is a simple Chrome add-on that restores the sharing functionality to Google Reader. If you want to continue sharing through Google Reader with its own sharing configuration, or if you simply don’t have Google+ and don’t feel like opening an account just so you can share, you should definitely try out Reader Sharer.

Once you install the add-on, head over to Reader and check if your sharing buttons have been restored. You might need to refresh the page to get them back. But sure enough, here they are!

Reader Sharer restores the entire Reader sharing interface. You can set up who you want to share with, and then share items or share with note, exactly like it used to be. The sharing settings are now back on your sidebar where they used to be, between “All items” and “Explore”.

Reader Sharer comes in two versions. One that simply adds the sharing options (linked above), and another one which also takes care of the new spacing problem in list mode. Using the second version, you can kill two birds with one rock – get your sharing options back and fix the spacing.

Reader Sharer [Firefox]

Reader Sharer Monkey for Firefox comes in just one version, the one that also takes care of the spacing problem. This is not a Firefox add-on, but a Greasemonkey userscript. In order to get it, you have to first install Greasemonkey, and then head over to the userscript page and install the script.

Now, when you open Google Reader, all your sharing options will be back, and the extra spacing in list mode will be reduced.

FixStyleSheet [Chrome]

If you’re OK with Google+ sharing, and don’t want to mess with sharing options, try FixStyleSheet for GoogleReader. This is a simple Chrome extension that does just one thing: it changes the new spacing in Google Reader and lets you use your screen efficiently again. Here is what Google Reader looks like in list mode with the new look:

It’s not that this looks especially bad, but many people have lots of different feeds, and the more items you have on your screen, the easier it is to scan through them and find what you really want to read. The extra spacing also makes the post excerpt smaller, which makes it just a bit harder to understand what the post is about without clicking.

If you’re ready to fix this, download FixStyleSheet, and take another look at Google Reader. The change is automatic, you don’t even have to refresh.

See how much more compact it is? On my 15’’ screen, it increased the number of posts I can see without scrolling from 13 to 23! That’s a lot of wasted space recovered.

Another small thing FixStyleSheet does is make the post view a bit wider and a bit more compact. This is what it normally looks like:

And this is what it looks like after installing the add-on. The title is now smaller, and the whole post stretches over a somewhat wider area, so it takes up less room on your screen.

The change is not huge here, but if you’re minimalistic and don’t care much for formatting, it’s a nice change.

Bottom Line

Changes to the user interface of a product you use regularly is always a tough ride. We all have our way of doing things, and when a company comes in and changes everything on us, we’re bound to be looking for ways to soften the blow. This doesn’t mean the change is necessarily bad.

Making users share only through Google+ is quite a different move, and is not necessarily meant to improve our experience as users, but to improve Google+’s standing. So don’t be shy, if you’ve been using the share option in Google Reader, get the add-on and resume your normal sharing routine.

What do you think of all these changes from Google? Do you like the changes to Reader, or are there other elements to the change you don’t like? Share in the comments!

4 Browser Userscripts That Make Google Music Even Better

Justin Pot — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:31:22 +0000

Add new features to Google Music. Whether you want to download songs from anywhere, view lyrics for currently playing songs, scrobble your songs to Last.FM or just remove the stripes from the interface, userscripts from around the web have you covered.

The new Google Music Beta puts your tunes online, meaning you can stream them from any web browser. Greasemonkey allows creative hackers to add new features to online services. So it’s only natural that there are already some great userscripts out there for Google Music. I’ve found four and compiled them below. All of them work on Firefox with Greasemonkey; Chrome users can install these scripts too, but results will vary.

Download Songs From Google Music

It’s perhaps the first question I hear when I explain Google Music – can I download songs from it? Officially, the answer is no. Unofficially, yes. A script makes this possible. Once you’ve installed this script, and start playing a song, you’ll see a down arrow to the left of the other buttons:

Don’t see it? Refresh your Google music page; it will show up. Press the button to start the download:

As you can see, the currently playing track can be downloaded. The file will be called “stream.mp3″, but you’ll find that the ID3 tag is still in place. This would be a stressful way to move a large quantity around but works wonderfully with individual tracks.

View Lyrics In Google Music

Whether you listen to music from languages you don’t speak natively or you just never got the hang of comprehending Bob Dylan, sometimes lyrics can be helpful. Google Music doesn’t come with lyric support, but there’s a script for the job:

Using this one couldn’t be easier; simply install the userscript and lyrics will start showing up every time you open a song. This one does take up some screen real estate, so netbook users might not like it, but it does what it says on the box.

Use Last.FM With Google Music

Are you a fan of both Last.FM and Google Music? Good news – you can now “scrobble” songs played on Google Music. A simple script does the job, and does it well. Install the script and you’ll see this option:

Click it, sign in with your account and you’ll be able to continue recording which songs you like best.

Want to learn more? Find a full walk-through on the script’s official page.

Remove The Stripes From Google Music

This one’s probably less “useful” than the others, but it’s worth pointing out. Google Music looks completely different than other Google services, sporting a orange and grey colour scheme and a lot of diagonal stripes. If you don’t dig the stripes however, you can remove them.

There’s pretty much nothing else to this script, but if getting rid of stripes is a dream of yours, consider yourself lucky. Find the script here. It can be installed in a variety of ways, including with Stylish or with Greasemonkey.

Conclusion

Google Music is great, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better. As always, enthusiasts have stepped up and offered ways to change this service for the better. I’m sure more will pop up in the months to come, so please, add them in the comments below.

TamperMonkey Finally Brings Greasemonkey To Android [2.1+]

Angela Alcorn — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:31:27 +0000

If you spend a lot of time online, you’ve probably come across Greasemonkey before. For the uninitiated, Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which allows you to run little scripts which affect the pages you’re browsing. These scripts can do all sorts of useful things, like adding links to your favourite MP3 store in Last.fm or hiding YouTube comments to stop you wanting to poke your eyes out. There’s an amazing amount of Greasemonkey scripts out there and you can now use them on your Android phone.

TamperMonkey is the tool you need to get your favourite Greasemonkey scripts working on your Android phone. What’s more, it’s free and it makes it easy for you to search for your favourite scripts from Userscripts.

Getting TamperMonkey

TamperMonkey for Android can be found in the Android market and the free install only takes up 130KB of room. The application itself consists of a GUI for controlling and searching for new scripts, which doubles as a browser for you to use with your favourite scripts.

Using TamperMonkey

The application launches with a Google search page. Clicking on your menu button will take you to the various options for managing scripts, searching for scripts and browsing the Internet.

To install more scripts, the easiest way is to head to “Context” from the menu and click on “Get new scripts” and it will take you to the Userscripts webpage.

Browse away and click on install when you’ve found the script you want. TamperMonkey will verify that you really want to install the script and then you’re ready to roll.

Limitations & Thoughts

TamperMonkey is the first application to bring Greasemonkey capabilities to Android, which is a move many people are extremely happy about and will hopefully be copied and improved on by many other players in the near future. It’s still in beta, so it’s not entirely polished and perfect just yet. Not every script will function as hoped, which is to be expected in a beta application release.

The biggest limitation of TamperMonkey is that the Greasemonkey scripts will only work while you’re browsing in the TamperMonkey application. While that’s great if all you want is scripts running, most people have already put some thought into their favourite Android browser and have chosen something with far superior browsing features than TamperMonkey’s simple interface. Ideally, TamperMonkey should run in the background and aim to provide Greasemonkey script usage for users in whichever browser they happen to prefer. It’s a tough problem, but I’m sure someone will work out how to do it.

In the meantime, TamperMonkey has opened the doors to scripts in Android which is a promising step in the right direction and should be applauded. Now we’ll be watching eagerly to see how this develops.

More Greasemonkey Tips

You love Greasemonkey, right? Well, so do we:

Which Greasemonkey scripts do you think are best for mobile use? Do your favourite scripts work in Tampermonkey?

3 Browser-Based Tools To Block Any Domains from Google Search Results

Ann Smarty — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 01:31:35 +0000

Google has been doing a good job improving the quality of search results and fighting web spam. They are doing their best introducing various experiments trying to find out what you want while focusing on genuinely useful pages.

However you can’t please everyone and we have already shared some tips on improving Google search results including this post on the modified Google search versions that may improve your searching experience. Also, we have already listed some cool tools to highlight your favorite domains in search results. Today’s post is something related but absolutely different.

You might notice some familiar domains that pop up in the top 10 search results again and again. Chances are, you miss some variety and want to get rid of some sites you tend to see often. Here are a few browser-based tools for you to filter out any domains from search results.

1. Google Hit Hider By Domain

Search engines supported: Google

Works in: Firefox 4 (via Greasemonkey).

Google Hit Hider by Domain lets you block domains from Google search results via the “Block” button:

The button lets you:

Block sites and domains (you can still see them within the results in gray);
“Perma-ban” (block domains completely without any trace);
See the list of your blocked domains:

If you choose the first option (just block the domain), the result will still be there but without any clutter:

The script help section, blocked domain list and the options are accessible via a tiny badge to the right:

2. Search Noise Reduction

Search engines supported: Google and Bing

Works in: The script is advertised to work only in Opera but it does also work in Firefox 4 (via Greasemonkey).

Search Noise Reduction is a little userscript that adds a tiny scissors icon next to each search result.

Clicking the icon lets you specify how much from the domain you want to block: a subdirectory, a subdomain or all the domain results:

Note: The script will only work for your first search or for all your searches if you always use your browser search box. If you continue searching using the Google search box, the Google search results URL will look like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=YOUR+FIRST+SEARCH#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=YOUR+SECOND+SEARCH&fp=c8774eba70bd538

- which for some reason disables the script. So if you want the script to always work, you will have to initiate a new search session each time by searching from your browser search box (or from Google Toolbar).

You can access your block list as well as save it locally by using the tiny icon at the top-right:

3. Personal Blocklist (by Google)

Search engines supported: Google

Works in: Google Chrome

Personal Blocklist (see our review of the extension here: Personal Blocklist: Block Unwanted Search Results In Google [Chrome]) is the official Google extension for Google Chrome. According to the description, Google analyzes your blocking patterns to make conclusions about its search engine results page usefulness:

When you choose to block or unblock a pattern, the extension will also transmit to Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed. You agree that Google may freely use this information to improve our products and services.

Some Features To Play With

Hide the browser button by right-clicking on it and selecting “Hide button”.
Import and export a list of patterns.
Block host of currently active tab.

Any other fun addons to block domains from Google search results to remove noise? Please let us know your thoughts!

3 Great Ways To Tweak Your Google Reader Interface With Userscripts

Ann Smarty — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 01:30:06 +0000

Google Reader is another free Google tool that I can’t live without (coming right next after Google Search and Google Docs).

Google Reader has been always almost perfect: and it’s been fun watching it being improved: the added cool search option and some interface tweaks have made it even better.

But there’s nothing too perfect under the sun, and the below userscripts have been quite good at making Google Reader experience even better.

(All the below Google Reader userscripts have been tested on FireFox 4 + Greasemonkey, but they may work in other browsers as well)

1. Add Favicons to the Feed List

Favicons for Google Reader is an old, but still functioning userscript that adds domain favicons to the corresponding feeds in your left-hand list. This way the feeds are much easier to recognize:

2. Make the Most of the Screen Real Estate

Google Reader Absolutely Customizable is an ideal userscript for those who access Google Reader interface using a laptop or a mobile browser as it lets you make the most of the screen real estate:

Get rid of the top navigation;
Resize the left-hand sidebar navigation;
Get rid of “All items” in the left-hand sidebar;
Condense white space;
Move search box; many others.

Any of the above behavior can be turned on / off using the tool “absolutely customizable” (as the name suggests) options:

Let’s see it in action!

Here’s your regular Google Reader interface:

And here’s how Google Reader looks after you have the script installed and all its options checked:

Other userscripts with similar functionality:

Google Reader Minimalistic is another fun option to try here that does pretty much the same but is harder to customize.
Helvetireader is yet another great userscript to minimize your Google Reader interface.

Note: all of the minimalistic userscripts in this section are incompatible with the “Favicons for Google Reader” script above, so you’ll have to choose one.

3. Color and Filter Feed Items

Google Reader – Colorful List View is a fun userscript that visualizes the feeds in your list by the source. Whether it makes the Gogle Reader interface more usable or more cluttered is the matter of personal taste. Here’s what it looks like (the “List” view):

The userscript options are available on Google Reader “Settings” page. From there you can set:

To colorize only read / unread items (or both)
To colorize only expanded / list view (or both);
To colorize comment view

Google Reader Filter is a userscript that allows to highlight feed items in the list by keyword (as well as filters duplicated entries and unwanted content). After the user script is installed, a “Google Reader Filter” button appears in the top-right corner of Google Reader interface. The button allows you to quickly access your filter and keyword highlight settings:

The userscript works as follows:

Feed items with banned keywords are in gray (these can be totally hidden upon your settings);
Feed items with your favorite keywords are highlighted:

This userscript only works with Google Reader’s list view and not expanded view – switch to list view from the view tabs on the upper right.

Are you an avid Google Reader user? Do you think the Google Reader userscript above would come in handy? Please share your thoughts!

How To De-clutter And Simplify Your Facebook Wall

Ann Smarty — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:30:40 +0000

Facebook Wall is a powerful tool: it lets you stay in touch with hundreds of people all over the world and keep up-to-date with what they are up to and what they share. With it being such an important tool, it is quite clear why it has been tweaked so many times throughout the life of the social network.

You can see lots of things at a glance once you enter your Facebook dashboard: your friends’ current mood and thoughts, your friends’ new friends, your friends’ photos, etc; as well as your new potential friends, your friends’ upcoming events and lots of other things. With so much information stuffed into one page, it is easy to get lost. With Facebook killing default wall filters while quietly introducing new wall settings, seeing what you actually want becomes almost impossible.

Would you like to have more power over your wall? The following user scripts will help you to tweak your Facebook wall to de-clutter and simplify it!

Note: All the three user scripts listed here to declutter Facebook have been tested on FireFox (through Greasemonkey). They should also work on Google Chrome.

1. Simplified Facebook

Simplified Facebook adds a new box to your Facebook wall that enables you to easily filter out certain updates from your wall:

Remove likes,
Remove new friendships,
Remove applications,
Remove links,
Remove photos,
Remove applications.

2. Remove Facebook Right-Column

Remove Facebook Right-Column: While the above script lets you filter out irrelevant updates from your stream, this one lets you move focus to your wall updates. It removes the right column that contains pokes, events, “People you may know” and other things that clutter your home page:

3. Better Facebook

Better Facebook is the most advanced script of all reviewed here. Whether it makes Facebook experience simpler or more complicated is for you to decide but some of its options do turn really effective to declutter your Facebook home page:

1. Use powerful feed filters to remove certain updates from your wall. Better Facebook “Feed filter” feature gives you access to multiple options which can change your Facebook stream completely. For example, you can:

Hide / minimize / move / apply certain CSS to… all updates from any friend of yours (to stop hearing from him without “un-friending”);
Hide / minimize / move / apply certain CSS to… all updates of a certain type (links, notes, friends tagged in a video or photo, application updates, etc, etc)
Hide / minimize / move / apply certain CSS to… all updates from a certain application;

Mind that using filters may slow down Facebook while posts are being processed. Using many filters may cause increased slowdown on slower computers.

2. Easily remove certain boxes: Better Facebook allows you to disable many of the boxes that appear in the right sidebar, including those that Better Facebook adds itself:

Just clicking the “X” to remove any panels you no longer want to see.
You can also click the header title of any box in the right panel to “collapse” it without removing it completely!

3. Mark as read and /or mute certain updates: if some of the threads seem to be taking too long or you just want to mark something as read to archive it, use the tool’s Gmail-like “Mute” and “Mark as Read” options available for each individual post as well as for all the visible threads via the control panel:

Are you aware of any more tricks to simplify your Facebook experience? Please let us know in the comments!

4 Browser Extensions To Dim The Lights & Move The Focus To Any YouTube Video

Ann Smarty — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 01:31:18 +0000

There can be several reasons why you would love to watch your favorite YouTube videos on a dark background with no extra page elements visible: it creates a cool “cinema watching” experience, it removes all clutter and moves the focus to the video.

With “lights” off you don’t feel yourself distracted by “related videos” to the right or users’ comments (which are usually a mess by the way). Full-screen mode could be a good solution to see the video only, but sometimes the video resolution doesn’t allow that. Besides, as you’ll see from the screenshots below, videos on the black background just look somehow nicer.

I was able to find 4 different browser extensions that allow you to dim the light for any YouTube video. Here they are :

1. YouTube Cinema

YouTube Cinema hides everything on the page except for the video and lets you easily select the background color (as well as the video size) from the handy bar on the right:

With this extension, the videos will open in YouTube Cinema mode by default. You will need to hold the CTRL key down while clicking to open a video in the usual mode.

YouTube Cinema’s options allow you to:

Disable / enable the auto-play;
Set the default video size;
Disable / enable video description:

Supported Browsers:

Firefox 3.5b4 – 3.6.*

2. YouTube Enhancer

YouTube Enhancer is a feature-rich user script (I already mentioned it in my post on getting rid of popular YouTube annoyances) that lets you dim the lights for any YouTube video once you click the “light” icon.

The icon dims everything except for the YouTube Enhancer player controls:

Clicking anywhere outside the video will bring the light back on.

Supported Browsers:

Firefox (via Greasemonkey), Opera, Google Chrome (the latest version), Flock, Safari, SeaMonkey (with a patch).

3. Turn Off The Lights

Turn Off the Lights is another cross-browser extension that adds some fun to YouTube video viewing.

Similar to the one above, it works via a little lamp icon (but this one is located in your bookmarks toolbar) that fades the page to dark and brings focus to the video. Clicking the icon again brings the light back on.

If you see no Lamp button after the installation, go to View > Toolbars > Customize in the menu and drag the “Turn Off the Lights” addon onto your toolbar.

A few fun features of this extension:

It supports multiple video sites: YouTube, HTML5 video, embedded videos, etc.
It support multiple image sites: e.g. Google Images Search, Flickr, etc.

Supported Browsers:

Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari

4. Lights Out

Lights Out is another user script that does only that: dims the light on YouTube videos. So if you don’t want to mess around with other options and features, this could be a good choice.

It works via an icon:

Clicking the icon once brings a semi-transparent background;
Clicking the icon twice creates a black background;
Clicking the icon yet again brings the light back on:

Supported Browsers:

Firefox (not tested on other browsers)

Do you think dimming the lights could improve your watching experience? Which of the addons above are you willing to give a try? Do you know of any others? Share your thoughts!

4 Common YouTube Annoyances & How To Get Rid Of Them With Userscripts

Ann Smarty — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 01:31:16 +0000

We do love YouTube and the awesome user-generated resource of cool timely videos it has grown into over time. We love its variety and flexibility: we have seen already how to search YouTube like a PRO, how to control the player using keyboard shortcuts and how to use YouTube Editor. There is really something for anyone there.

However you can’t please everyone all the time and there are many people who find some of YouTube’s features annoying (while loving the resource overall). Let’s try to cope with the most popular YouTube annoyances:

1. Autoplay

As well as the buffering feature which forces the video to play immediately once the page loads, and then stops the video frequently to buffer it.

2. Video quality

There is no good way to choose the default quality of a video (based on your preferences and connection settings).

3. Advertisements Embedded Within A Video

Clicking X to close an advert again and again in each video you watch is really disturbing.

4. No Way To Easily Access Some Great Built-In Features

For example, there is no way to loop videos selectively.

Here are a few userscripts that cope with all of these annoyances effectively:

YouTube HD Ultimate

YouTube HD Ultimate is a userscript which forces YouTube to select the highest video quality a user’s computer can handle (with options to lower it if the computer has problems playing 1080px videos).

Supported Browsers

FireFox (via Greasemonkey) and Opera.

Options

Options can be found in the upper-right-hand corner of a YouTube page:

From there (among other things) you can:

Set the default quality of each video;
Enable / disable autoplay;
Hide / show annotations.

If you hover over any option settings, you’ll see a short explanation as well as the general recommendations as to how to use each one:

YouTube Enhancer

YouTube Enhancer is a feature-rich userscript similar to the above one with more cross-browser compatibility options and a different feature layout.

Supported Browsers

FireFox (via Greasemonkey), Opera, Google Chrome (the latest version), Flock, Safari, SeaMonkey (with a patch).

The script installs its own player controls that allow to play, pause, loop, rewind, download and even convert the current video as well as set the quality:

The script also has global options for all YouTube videos accessed via the “General options” link on top of the video:

YouTube Auto Buffer & Auto HD & Remove Ads

YouTube Auto Buffer & Auto HD & Remove Ads is a userscript whose name speaks pretty much for itself. Its main feature is removing adverts embedded into the videos. Besides that, it buffers the video without autoplaying and puts it in HD if the option is on.

Supported Browsers

FireFox (via Greasemonkey) and Opera (with some reported issues with Autobuffer Options).

The script options are nicely integrated into the YouTube interface allowing you to:

Choose between autoplay / autobuffer options;
Set the default quality;
Hide in-video ads:

Note: there’s one minor annoyance with the tool which you may notice: the script allows the video to play for a second and then pauses it.

Endless YouTube

Endless YouTube: If you are one of those people who tend to watch or listen to one and the same music / video clip over and over again, this script is right for you. It enables you to loop the whole video or a part of it for it to play over and over until you close the tab.

Supported Browser

FireFox (via Greasemonkey).

Just set the time interval you want to loop or click “Loop video” to play the whole clip again and again:

Are there any other YouTube annoyances you wish you could cope with? Let’s try to find the solutions together!

4 Great Greasemonkey Scripts To Easily Browse & Scan Through Google Cache

Ann Smarty — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 22:31:55 +0000

Google cache is an awesome tool that can prove really handy for various purposes. For example, clicking through Google cache links from within search results pages will highlight your search terms and allow you to easier locate them on the target page.

Besides, Google cache can also be used as a proxy server to bypass office and school firewalls or access sites which are blocked in your area, restricted for registered-only users (but visible to search engines), etc. Using Google cache will also allow you to browse your competitors’ sites without leaving any trace of you being there (for that, you will need to use Google’s “Text only” version of the page).

I for one use Google cache on a daily basis and have collected a few useful tools to make the most of it. But before we take a closer look at those tools, let me note the following:

Not all webpages are available in Google cache. Savvy website owners may choose not to allow Google to archive their webpages by using the NOARCHIVE Robots meta tag;
All of the below tools are userscripts. I’ve tested them all in FireFox with Greasemonkey installed. If you use Opera, Google Chrome, Safari or IE, you should be able to still use the scripts but I didn’t try them there.

So here you go: how to make the most of Google cache browsing with the following userscripts:

Browse Google Cache

If you start using Google cache, the fist thing you will notice is that it won’t let you stay for long: whenever you click any link, it will bring you outside of the cached page to the actual website. If you plan to use Google cache often, you may want to have an option to stay within it when browsing the whole website.

If you want to browse the website from within Google cache without ever leaving it, you will need either of the following scripts:

(Note: as I have noted above, some pages may be absent in Google cache which means that sometimes you’ll end up landing on Google’s error messages).

1. Google Cache Continue Redux

This script adds yellow “cache” links next to each page link within Google’s snapshot of the page. Clicking the yellow cache link opens the Google cache version of the page, allowing the user to continue browsing the site through Google’s cache.

Before:

After:

Does it keep the initial search terms highlighted? – Yes!

2. Google Cache Browser

This script (or this identical one) replaces the links on a cached page for Google cache links – this way you can continuously browse the website from within Google cache just like Google Cache Continue Redux but with no formatting used for Google cache links (and also giving you thus fewer options: with it, you can’t easily leave Google cache by clicking off the actual link).

Before:

After:

Does it keep the initial search terms highlighted? – No

Easily Scan Through The Page Cache

1. Google Cache Highlights Browser

This script makes Google cache keyboard-friendly. It creates two hotkeys (“n” for “next” and “b” for “previous”) that will automatically scroll through highlighted search words on a Google cache page:

2. Google Cache Mapper (Text-Only Version)

This script adds a virtual scrollbar to the left of the screen that provides a quick way to find highlighted terms on a Google cached page. Google highlights your search terms using different colors and this script visualizes the matches.

You can hover over any part of the scrollbar to see the search term and its immediate context. You can then click through the different colors in the scrollbar to go to any search term occurrence:

Do you use Google cache a lot? Please share your tips and tricks!