Posts Tagged ‘greasemonkey’

Include jQuery in Greasemonkey – the nice way

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

When someone wants to write a bit more complex javascript with Greasemonkey, the plain getElementsBy functions may not be enough: enter jQuery. But how to include jQuery, without messing up the original document, eg. without causing a leak to the unsafeWindow? Most people include it the old way (using header script inclusion), which is not that nice; here’s what I do (though probably nothing new under the sun):

(function(){
  
GM_xmlhttpRequest({
   method: "GET",
   url: "http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.2.6.pack.js",
   onload: run
});

function run(details) {

   if (details.status != 200) {
       GM_log("no jQuery found!");
       return;
   }

   eval(details.responseText);
   var $ = jQuery;
  
   //do something useful here....
}

})();

First we bootstrap jQuery using the GM_xmlhttpRequest builtin function (cross-domain ajax from GM) then we evaluate the whole stuff in our little sandbox. Hope someone finds this useful.

Edit: as Tibor noted bellow in the comments there’s a new require tag in Greasemonkey 0.8+, that can be used for the same purpose. Unfortunately no matter how hard I tried it with Firefox 3.0.1 and GM 0.8.2008x this did not work, or at least the provided example did nothing for me.

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Overriding css rules with Greasemonkey

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

With Greasemonkey one can rewrite webpages on the fly: while the possibilities are pretty much infinite, sometimes all I need is a simple css fix (without messing with userchrome).

Most scripts use the addGlobalStyle(css) function (create style tag and attach it to html head), but the Greasemonkey API has a much more convenient way for that: GM_addStyle().

GM_addStyle(
    'span.GM_igBkmTags { display: block; padding-bottom: 3px;' + 
        'border-bottom: 1px dotted silver; text-align: center; }' +
    'span.GM_igBkmTags a { padding-right: 10px; outline: 0; }';
);

I have found the dive into Greasemonkey site pretty useful, but their examples are way too outdated; Mozdev has a much better article for GM related functions!

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