The new Google Chrome 4 has support for Greasemonkey scripts. That's bad news for Firefox.
The creator of Greasemonkey, Google employee Aaron Boodman, reports the Greasemonkey support on the weblog of Chromium, the open source project of Google. The Userscripts.org site already contains more than 40 thousand scripts. The number of 'regular' extensions for Chrome is now a few thousand. The browser introduced the extension feature last month.
The Google browser treats the user scripts the same as regular Chrome Extensions. Installing and disabling is done in the same way. Greasemonkey extensions allow users to attach small snippets of Javascript code to web pages so that sites can be customized in their own ways. For example, the design of popular sites can be adjusted automatically.
Firefox
According to Boodman, not all user scripts work perfectly with Chrome, because of the differences between the Google browser and Firefox. But those differences affect only 15 to 25 percent of the 40,000 scripts, he writes. Meanwhile, Google is working on improving compatibility with Greasemonkey scripts.
The Greasemonkey support represents another setback for Firefox in the battle with Google. Boodman wrote Greasemonkey in 2004 for Firefox. But now it helps the competing browser to support most of these scripts directly.
Chrome 4 is officially only available for Windows, but there are beta versions for Mac and Linux. The latest test versions have already arrived at version 5.
Source: Webwereld
