1. AdBlock Plus

AdBlock Plus was for the longest time one of the most installed extensions for Mozilla Firefox. When Google finally started allowing extensions for Chrome, many users cried out for AdBlock Plus to port an extension over to Chrome.

The extension is fairly simple to use: install it, pick a “filter list“, add any whitelisted domains and you are good to go.

Ads are blocked on every website that is not listed in your whitelist and it even blocks ads within YouTube videos.

I will leave it to your judgment to decide whether it is appropriate to use ad blockers on the web.

2. Shareaholic

Most websites and blogs have a Twitter “Tweet” button or a Facebook “Like” button, however what happens if you want to post the contents of that site to a Tumblr blog or Reddit it? If you find yourself in a situation like this, I would recommend installing the Shareaholic extension.

This extension places an icon on your Chrome toolbar that lists your chosen social media and other links allowing you to share, email, print and save the blog post or article that you are reading.

You can login to your own Shareaholic account and tweak the services that are visible on your Chrome browser.

3. Mega Buttons

A large majority of Chrome’s features are buried within the about:plugins, about:flags, about:extensions and other pages. The Mega Button extension places a large green button on your Chrome toolbar that allows easy access to all these and more features.

While the extension is useful, unless you know what each icon refers to, it can be a little difficult to find the right link.

The links (in order) refer to the following features:

• Download
• Extensions
• History
• Bookmarks
• Plugins
• DNS
• Memory
• Cache
• Flags

4. Clickable Links

This extension simply converts “unclickable” URLs and Email addresses into clickable ones.

Websites and blogs will often post links such as:

www.google.com

In some cases, they decide not to turn the link into a hyperlink. This extension automatically generates a hyperlink out of the unclickable links. Simply install it and restart your browser for it to work.

5. Send Using Gmail

This is another extension that is very simple but immensely useful.

Some sites have Email addresses to contact the sites owner, usually these are in the format:

abhiroopb@maketecheasier.com

If you click on the Email address it automatically opens a compose window within your default Email client. Unfortunately, most computers have their default Email client set to their desktop client, such as Outlook. After installing this extension, when you click on an Email link, it will automatically open your default email account.

Bonus: Greasemonkey Scripts

On Firefox, Greasemonkey is an extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to the HTML content of a web page immediately after it has loaded. Unfortunately, Greasemonkey is a Firefox only extension, however most of the scripts that work with Greasemonkey on Firefox also work on Chrome. Furthermore, there is no need to install the Greasemonkey extension. All you have to do, is head over to http://userscripts.org/ and click “Install” on any script you wish to install in Chrome. Some of the scripts will not work correctly, but most do.

Image credit: shauser

1. Download From YouTube

There are multiple methods for downloading YouTube videos to the local disk. This particular script was highlighted because it provides multiple download formats, and cleanly integrates into the existing YouTube interface. You can download videos in the format of your choice directly from the YouTube video page.

2. RapidShare Autowait

As the name implies, this script removes some of the hassle of downloading from RapidShare. While you’d normally have to wait until RapidShare is ready to start your download, this script will let you “just open all links in tabs and go play outside”.

3. Super iGoogle

For those who’ve always wanted to like iGoogle but were unhappy with the cluttered layout, this script comes flying to the rescue in red and blue spandex. Not only does it remove lots of clutter (sidebars, outrageously huge header, etc) it lets you specifically choose which page elements will be shown at any given time.

As a down side though, it doesn’t work cleanly with all iGoogle themes.

4. Google Image Relinker

To avoid accusations of “stealing” images, Google Image Search links to the pages which contain the images, instead of directly to the image itself. This is good for the sites hosting the images, but it can be annoying for those who have to browse through large quantities of images to find what they need. This script, and others like it, bypass the hosting site and take you directly from the search results to the image.

5. Remove All Facebook Ads

Ads are what give us many of the free things we get online, and without them there wouldn’t be great sites like MakeTechEasier. There are, however, situations where ads can get out of control and become distracting. If you want to remove Facebook’s targeted ads, this script will take care of that.

6. Last.fm Lyrics

This script works on Last.fm song pages to include the lyrics from the song. The information is pulled from Wikia which has a large user-contributed database of song lyrics.

There are thousands more user-created browser scripts available online. If you’ve got any favorites you’d like to share with us, please drop a note in the comments!

By itself, Greasemonkey does essentially nothing. At least, nothing that you as a user would notice. To really use it, you download Greasemonkey scripts which all have some special purpose. For example, right now I’m writing this from a browser with Greasemonkey installed, and I’m using scripts to enhance YouTube, Facebook, and Google Images.

The Greasemonkey website describes the general function pretty well -

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.
Hundreds of scripts are already available for free. And if you’re the tinkerer sort, you can also write your own.

I should note that some other browsers support these scripts, but often in a limited fashion. Opera can run some Greasemonkey scripts, and Safari has Creammonkey to achieve a similar end.

Installation

You can download the Firefox extension from the Greasespot homepge. It will install normally just like any other Firefox addon, and you’ll likely have to restart your browser. Once it’s back open, you should see a Greasemonkey icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

Adding Scripts

Once installed, you can begin adding in scripts. The scripts will not require a browser restart, but if you’ve already got the page open that the script is meant to act on (such as YouTube), you may need to refresh the page. To get an idea of the type of changes Greasemonkey can do, here’s a comparison of the same YouTube video page with and without the YouTube Enhancer script.

First the normal YouTube play screen…

And now with Greamonkey enhancements…

As you can see, this gives you a LOT more options in terms of video quality and control. This is just one of MANY great user scripts available from userscripts.org.

Recommended Scripts

No Greasemonkey article would be complete without a list of some of the most useful user scripts. Here I’ve listed some of the ones I’ve found to be particularly helpful.

• YouTube Enhancer – Demonstrated above, adds new video controls and download option to YouTube.
• TinyURL Decoder – Shows you what’s behind those TinyURL redirects so you’ll never get Rickrolled again.
• Textarea Resize – Allows for a larger text area in websites that only provide a small text box.
• Folders4Gmail – Allows you to organize your GMail labels into a category hierarchy so you can use “sub-labels”.
• YouTube Cleaner – Removes some of the extra cruft from YouTube (like comments) that you may not want. Can be easily enabled/disabled.
• Pre-Fill Comments – If you frequently comment on blogs like MakeTechEasier, you can use this script to automatically fill in your name/email/URL.

And many, many more.

Do you have any Greasemonkey scripts you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments!