Show Amazon.com prices in your local currency
Remove Ads from the CNN website
Remove Ads from Myspace.com
Make all "mailto:" links point to your Gmail.com account

Wouldn't it be great if you could make those web pages do all those things? You can. Easily. And more! Firefox allows extensions that add functionality to the browser, and there is one very powerful one called GreaseMonkey that provides the ability to make changes to how your browser works with each specific web page.

GreaseMonkey allows custom-written scripts that either change the way a specific web page looks, or the way it works. When you open a page using the FireFox browser, GreaseMonkey checks to see if you have installed a script for that page. If there is a script, it will run, changing whatever its supposed to change. There are hundreds of scripts that work with all sorts of different websites.

My favorite GreaseMonkey script adds Google Suggest dynamic drop-down functionality to the regular Google search form and the search results page. There are too many great scripts to describe here, so click this link for an extensive list of the scripts.

Before you can use one of these scripts you need to install GreaseMonkey into your FireFox browser. Click Here for the download. Once you have the extension installed, you can right-click on any link that points to a GreaseMonkey script and select the option "Install User Script…".

I'll install the Google Suggest script to show you how it all works.

Greasemonkey selection

Clicking the install button will pop up a box like the one below. Just click OK; you don't need to change any of these settings.

Greasemonkey installation

If everything goes alright, you'll get a Success message, alerting you that the script was installed.

Go to a page that is supposed to be affected by the script. For our Google Suggest example, go to http://www.google.com/ to see it. If you don't see a change, refresh the page.

Greasemonkey in use

This stuff is great!

Here are download links to everything you will need to use GreaseMonkey.