Greasemonkey and Greased Lightbox for Firefox and Safari
March 30th, 2007
I have recently become a fan of the brilliant Firefox Extension, Greasemonkey. The extension can be downloaded from www.greasespot.net and allows you to run user-built javscript scripts within Firefox to increase automation or make the browsing experience more enjoyable. The scripts are able to modify the original code of a webpage to insert extra functionalities. For example, you can integrate ‘Google Reader’ news items into your Gmail Inbox UI or make the blue facebook interface green! The possibilites are endless.
The scripts
I run a couple of scripts in my browser. The first one, Facebook Autologin, is for pure laziness. Those familiar with facebook know that as soon as you close your browser, you will have to log back in again next time you visit the site. The autologin script saves you this pain so you can just sit back and watch as you get logged in by the browser!
The other script I run is by far the greatest extension to Firefox yet created! It is called ‘Greased Lightbox‘ and seriously enhances image viewing experiences on the Web. Wherever thumbnails of images are displayed on the web (Google Image Search, Flickr, Facebook etc), Greased Lightbox automatically latches onto the link to the full blown version of the images. When you click on the thumbnails, instead of opening the new html page with the full image embedded (normally quite slow), the script uses the beautiful Lightbox 2 javascript library to create a dynamic effect where the original web page with the thumbnails fades out and the enlarged version of the image is overlayed on top (see screenshots!).
The result
On services such as Facebook or Flickr, this can save a lot of time and allows really quick and easy previewing of thumbnails. On Google Image Search, things go a step further. Instead of having to first visit the desired image in its real context and then clicking through to see the image in full size, Greased Lightbox skips out this stage. You are now able to view the full size image on the Google Image Search results page just by clicking the thumbnail you want.
For the Apple munchers
If you are a Mac User and prefer Safari to Firefox then don’t despair, there is a similar Extension to Greasemonkey called ‘Cream Monkey‘ which supports the script.
Check out the screenshots below to get a better idea of what this is about.
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