Tim Gaden08 December 2006, 2:10 PM
Creammonkey aims to bring the power of Firefox's Greasemonkey extension to Safari. I should tell you that it is nowhere close, but it can still perform tricks that makes Safari more pleasant to use.
Creammonkey is an open-source sourceforge project that aims to bring the power of Firefox's Greasemonkey extension to Safari.
Before you keep reading, I should tell you that it is nowhere close to Greasemonkey. The developer is quite open about the problems:
Creammonkey is not 100% compatible with Greasemonkey. Because Safari's JavaScript implementation is not compatible with Firefox and some Greasemonkey specific functions are not available in Creammonkey.
Even so, Creammonkey can still perform a few neat tricks which make Safari even nicer to use.
After installing the app, which comes in the form of an Input Manager, you will see a smiley in the menubar that tells you the installation was successful.
The smiley is heads a drop-down menu that allows you to activate the individual Greasemoneky scripts, install and delete them.
Previous builds slugged Safari with a big performance hit, slowing it down enough to make it unuseable. But the latest build released a few days ago keeps Safari nice and snappy.
Creammonkey installs scripts in the same way as Greasemonkey. Head over to the Greasemonkey script repository, userscripts.org, click the "Install this script" option in the top right hand window of any script description and follow the prompts.
Unfortunately, a lot of the useful and complicated scripts don't work with Creammonkey (yet). My favourite Greasemonkey tweaks for Gmail all failed, except for one (see more below).
Trial and error is the only way, although it's a fair bet that the more ambitious and complicated a script is, the more likely it is to fail.
Even so, it didn't take me long to find a couple of scrips that Creammonkey can run in Safari which make me smile:
Secure Gmail Mark Pilgrim's GMailSecure script also works, delivering a reliable https connection to your email. Nice.
Quick link to the ABC's video feeds
Australian fans of the ABC's streaming content will like the ABC Video on Demand Link script Greasemonkey script, which adds a quick link to the ABC's video content to the top-level menus on the ABC's web site. This works just as well in Creammonkey as it does in Greasemonkey.
As the developer hacks away at improving the code, this add-ons looks likely to add more and more Greasemonkey muscle to Safari. Greasemonkey is on the only thing I miss in Safari and now I can look forward to missing it less and less.