Enhance Your Browsing Experience Using User Scripts
Let’s face it—most web pages are far from perfect. Some don’t allow you do download something; others have too many flashy advertisements. There’s always some tiny little thing that bugs you—something simple that you feel that even you could have fixed the problem. And because we spend so much of our time online, it would be nice to have these problems magically fixed. Enter user-scripts, your new best friend.
What Are User Scripts?
Basically, a script is a code or a command that targets a specific piece of software
(a web page in our case) and modifies its appearance or its behaviour.
Technicalities aside, a user-script changes the look of the web page
that you are browsing by adding or removing certain elements to make
your browsing experience more comfortable. For instance, there is a
script to add a ‘Download’ button next to the YouTube
video, which means you can download the video from within the site! Now
you might be wondering how you can use these scripts. Well, it depends
on the browser.
How To Start?
Userscripts.org
is a website that hosts thousands of these scripts written by people
like us, the functions of which range from pre-loading comics to
auto-players for Facebook games. To install these scripts on to your browser, you will first need a very handy extension—Greasemonkey,
an extension that allows users to install and apply these scripts
real-time. For Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer users, you can
simply install this extension to your browser, and then go to
userscripts.org to find their desired scripts. For Opera and Google
Chrome users, the process is a lot simpler because these browsers can
install such scripts inherently—no need for any extensions.
With
the hundreds of thousands of user scripts, sifting through them is not
only tedious, but nearly impossible. Below are some of the user-scripts
that you might enjoy and find very handy:
AutoPagerize
For readers like us, some websites grinds our gears by dividing long
articles into multi-page web-pages with the annoying ‘Next Page’
hyperlink. But with AutoPagerize,
the website will display the full article on the same page, meaning you
can have an easy read without the trouble of moving through pages.
YouTube Download
If you’re a YouTube aficionado, you’re going to love YouTube Download.
With this handy script installed, you can download videos directly from
YouTube. You’ll get a link to download the video right below the video,
including options to select different qualities and formats!
Inline Mp3 Player
Inline Mp3 Player script allows you to listen to any links containing Mp3 files, right on the webpage - so no downloading without playing.
FFixer
According to Alexa Rankings, Facebook is more popular in Nepal than
Google, so if we’re going to spend so much time on it, let’s make it
better, shall we? With Facebook Fixer (FFixer),
you can see bigger profile pictures and photos; download links for the
videos, bookmarks for pages you want to visit later as well as keyboard
shortcuts.
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