Hacking Gmail

Gmail and

Greasemonkey

A

nother phenomenon to hit the web at the same time as

Gmail was the Firefox browser. Indeed, the growth of this

open source application easily rivaled Gmail for shocking

explosiveness. Apart from the additional security benefits and

tasty user interface advantages that Firefox gives, the browser is

also open to a considerable amount of hacking in itself. One of

the key hacks for Firefox was Greasemonkey. In this chapter, you

learn how Greasemonkey and Firefox can be used to radically

improve your Gmail experience, and how the understanding you

now have about the workings of Gmail will enable you to build

your own Greasemonkey scripts.

What Is Greasemonkey?

Greasemonkey allows the user to assign snippets of JavaScript

code to run automatically whenever a certain page is loaded. The

upshot of this is that you can write JavaScript code that will cus-

tomize those web pages, modifying layout, adding new features,

or removing extraneous parts of the page. Greasemonkey has

been used to remove advertising, rewrite links, add new links to

other sites, and even add completely new menus to sites. Gmail,

being one huge hunk of burning JavaScript, is beautifully posi-

tioned to be taken advantage of by Greasemonkey.

To use Greasemonkey, you have to install it first. Do that by get-

ting the latest version from http://greasemonkey.mozdev.

org/.

The snippets of JavaScript used by Greasemonkey are called user-

scripts. They need to be installed into Firefox for the application to

work. You do that like this: Go to the page with the userscript in

it. It will look really ugly, with lots of JavaScript, and the top 20 or

so lines preceded by double forward-slashes, as in Figure 6-1.

̨What is

Greasemonkey?

Other Userscripts

̨Customizing the

Gmail experience

chapter

in this chapter