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NFJS2025

Greasemonkey: Ajax For One

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension with a hook to let you run your own JavaScript after each page loads. People have written hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts, each using Ajax techniques, to do everything from making a static page dynamic to changing a page's style to integrating comparison pricing on Amazon pages and giving Google search results easy keyboard shortcuts. Greasemonkey lets you take back control of the web browsing experience – and teaches you Ajax while you're at it.

In this talk we'll look at about a dozen useful Greasemonkey scripts. Each script provides a benefit in its own right, but like good engineers we'll dissect them to see what makes them tick.

Some scripts we'll cover:

  • Tracing XMLHttpRequest activity on a page
  • Avoiding the Slashdot effect with auto-links to mirrors
  • Replacing a page's CSS design
  • Making hidden form fields visible in the page
  • Auto refreshing pages
  • Browsing the web through Google's cache
  • Adding keyboard shortcuts to Google's search results
  • Auto-selecting ad-free print versions of online articles
  • Working around Google's protection of Google Book Search images
  • Comparing book prices inline
  • Downloading all the images behind thumbnails
  • Using Platypus for graphical page editing of pages you don't own!

Attendees leave this talk having more power over their web browsing and a great tool to get going with Ajax for one.


Jason Hunter

About Jason Hunter

Jason Hunter is Principal Technologist with Mark Logic, specializing in large-scale XML content manipulation using XQuery. He's probably best known as the author of “Java Servlet Programming” (O'Reilly Media). He's also an Apache Member and as Apache's representative on the Java Community Process Executive Committee he established a landmark agreement allowing open source Java. He's publisher of Servlets.com and XQuery.com, an original contributer to Apache Tomcat (and Apache Ant committer), the creator of the JDOM open source project, a member of the expert groups responsible for Servlet, JSP, JAXP, and XQJ API development, and was recently appointed Sun Java Champion. In 2003, he received the Oracle Magazine Author of the Year award, and in both 2005 and 2006, the JavaOne Outstanding Talk award. His largest audience was 15,000 at a JavaOne conference keynote.

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