Tampermonkey

Pros

• Freeware
• Powerful user script management

Cons

• Learning curve

Tampermonkey is a powerful user script manager that lets you tailor your browsing experience.

User scripts are programs often written in JavaScript or another scripting language. These programs are usually small—often consisting of a few lines or less—and are used to customize web browsing. A user script can affect a specific page, a certain class of pages or every page, and the effect can range from something as simple as adding a Like button to something as complex as a full-featured browser plugin.

A user script manager is an application that facilitates managing user scripts. These managers are often browser extensions with a user interface. Through the UI, you can create, organize, edit, load, delete, enable, disable and otherwise manipulate one or an entire collection of user scripts.

Tampermonkey is one such user script manager, and it is among the most popular options not only because it is sophisticated and refined but because it supports many different platforms—more on that in the conclusion. Tampermonkey is free to use but technically donationware, which means that the software is unrestricted, but if you enjoy it, the developer asks that you support him or her.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of Tampermonkey is that it allows you to create scripts from scratch. Using JavaScript, you can create a script one line at a time for your personal use or to be distributed to others. Tampermonkey even boasts an integrated code editor that is reasonably modern. It features line numbering, search, replace, jump to line, insert constructor, auto-indent all and so forth.

Most people who use Tampermonkey, however, are not going to code their own user scripts. That is all right because there is a large community of Tampermonkey users. The developers within that community often share their scripts to be used by others. There are scripts for dictating how tabs behave in Chrome as well as scripts for shaping how box scores are displayed on the ESPN website.

Tampermonkey provides you everything you need to manage as many scripts as you like. You can manage these user scripts locally. It will even back up your scripts to ZIP file and can restore directly from such archives. If you prefer cloud-based backup, it can do that as well, and Tampermonkey supports script synchronization via Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and other popular clouds.

Modifying scripts is simple. You can modify the scripts you have created as well as those you have installed from elsewhere. Enabling or disabling a script never takes more than two clicks. You can disable, modify and enable on the fly, which makes testing a new or edited script quite simple.

If you only use Tampermonkey as a platform through which to use scripts created by others, it is rather user-friendly. Installing, enabling, disabling and uninstalling are all simple procedures that do not require any particular technical expertise. If you intend to dig further into what Tampermonkey can do, there is a bit more of a learning curve, and the program never quite leads you by the hand.

Another potential issue with Tampermonkey is that it is a platform for potentially unwanted programs. These PUPs will often activate anti-virus programs and other protective mechanisms. It can be a bit of a hassle at times. On the other hand, if you are not careful, it is possible to enable a user script that is malicious or at least mischievous in intent.

Greasemonkey is the original such user script manager, but Greasemonkey only works with Firefox. Tampermonkey began as a Greasemonkey script. The code was then used to create the standalone Tampermonkey, which supports not just Chrome but Edge, Firefox, Opera, Safari and much more.

Pros

• Freeware
• Powerful user script management

Cons

• Learning curve