Is greasemonkey a built-in extension of Google's Chrome?

Question

I'm trying both greasemonkey and Google's Chrome extensions. And found that Chrome seems to be using the same API names as GM. (I seem to be having the same bug...)

Just wondering whether greasemonkey is already a Google Chrome extension?

Answer 1

Answering this in case anyone from more recent times is searching. There is now a script manager created for Chrome called TamperMonkey. It's now available for Firefox and Edge as well.

https://www.tampermonkey.net/

Answer 2

Yes, Chrome supports userscripts but not fully as Greasemonkey. For example check out this userscript

Docs Online Viewer: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/127774

It works well with Greasemonkey (in Firefox) but not with Chrome natively. There are many Greasemonkey functions that Chrome does not support yet.

Answer 3

I copy and paste a post from GreaseMonkey:

There is no greasemonkey extension for google chrome. What actually happened is chromium (the project which google chrome is based) developed it's own extension system and one component of that extension mechanism (probably inspired heavily by greasemonkey in the first place) works in almost exactly the same way (an external javascript interacting with a page purely through it's DOM) as greasemonkey. The chromium system uses a completely different api but effectively does the same thing. This large overlap in purpose and functionality combined with the popularity of greasemonkey on firefox meant they decided to implement the greasemonkey api (the majority of it anyway) natively within chromium. From there they went one step further and had the browser automatically wrap any greasemonkey scripts inside a chromium extension automatically and effectively made greasemonkey scripts a first class citizen.

Answer 4

@Simon pretty much hit it, but I wanted to make sure that this point is super-clear.

Google Chrome supports Greasemonkey scripts natively, using the same API so as to make existing scripts compatible. There's no Greasemonkey extension required.

Answer 5

Yes, I believe you can just add Greasemonkey scripts and Chrome installs them as an 'extension' like all the other native extensions.

Checkout this article:
http://lifehacker.com/5461675/chrome-4-supports-greasemonkey-userscripts-without-an-extension

Note, however that some scripts seem to be supported on GreaseMonkey for Firefox only and can be a little buggy in Chrome. I'm not sure of the exact differences in implementation.

Simon.