Add Google Suggest to the Google homepage; Remove Ads from Google; Auto-save emails in Gmail, while you type; Gmail delete button, to easily delete messages; Make all “mailto:” links point to Gmail…

Tailor Google To Your Needs

Wouldn’t it be great if you could change Google and Gmail to do those things? You can. Easily. And more! You’ll need Firefox, but luckily over half of Google Tutor readers now use this superior browser already. Firefox allows extensions that add functionality to the browser, and there is one very powerful one called GreaseMonkey that provides the ability to make changes to how your browser works with a web page.

GreaseMonkey allows custom-written scripts that either change the way a specific web page looks, or the way it works. When you open a page using the FireFox browser, GreaseMonkey checks to see if you have installed a script for that page. If there is a script, it will run, changing whatever it’s supposed to change. There are hundreds of scripts that work with all sorts of different websites, and I counted 45 just for Google and Gmail.

My favorite Google-related GreaseMonkey script adds Google Suggest dynamic drop-down functionality to the regular Google search form and the search results page. Another great one allows you to use regular dates (selected from pop up calendars!) with the powerful daterange: operator, instead of Julian dates. There are too many great scripts to describe here, so click this link for a complete list of the Google and Gmail scripts.

Before you can use one of these scripts you need to install GreaseMonkey into your FireFox browser. Click Here for the download. Once you have the extension installed, you can right-click on any link that points to a GreaseMonkey script and select the option “Install User Script”.

I’ll install the Google Suggest script to show you how it all works.

Clicking the install button will pop up a box like the one below. Just click OK; you don’t need to change any of these settings.

If everything goes alright, you’ll get a Success message, alerting you that the script was installed.

Go to a page that is supposed to be affected by the script. For our Google Suggest example, go to http://www.google.com/ to see it. If you don’t see a change, refresh the page.

This stuff is great!

Here are download links to everything you will need to use GreaseMonkey.

FireFox Browser Download
GreaseMonkey Extension Download – You need to open the extension installation with the FireFox Browser.
User Scripts – Not the only place to get these, it’s just a good list.

If you don’t currently use FireFox, you should. Besides the security and stability it offers, it loads fast, has the indispensable browser tags, and you can use GreaseMonkey and other cool extensions with it!

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Mark Fleming is the founder of a new blog called Google Tutor & Advisor. Google Tutor & Advisor offers in-depth Tips, Techniques and Advice for Google Users.

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