What is Greasemetal?
Greasemetal is a userscript runtime for Google Chrome. The runtime hosts userscripts (tiny javascript files that modify the webpages being displayed) to be executed on Google Chrome, similar to what Greasemonkey does for Mozilla Firefox, or Greasekit does for Safari.
Greasemetal is developed by Kazuho Oku as part of his research activity at Cybozu Labs, Inc., a public software compary in Japan. Greasemetal is licensed under GNU Public License version 2.
On Sep 13 2008, version 0.2 released with improved compatibility and support for some of the GM_* functions (detail).
How does it Work?
Google Chrome does not provide any interface to develop browser addons. Greasemetal modifies the behaviour of Google Chrome using an inter-process communication channel called AutomationProxy, which is used for automatically testing the functions of the web browser.
Using Greasemetal
To start using Greasemetal, download and execute the installer.
After installation, launch Greasemetal from the start menu. Greasemetal will in turn start up Google Chrome, while hooking its behaviours to insert userscripts.
Once you have started running Greasemetal, add userscripts to the userjs directory under your My Documents folder (or Documents folder on Windows Visa). If you are unfamiliar with userscripts, a number of scripts are available from userscripts.org.
Limitations and Known Issues
Limitations, known issues under version 0.2.
- no UI for userscript management (yet)
- no support for following functions: GM_xmlHttpRequest, GM_setValue, GM_getValue, GM_registerMenuCommand
More Information
Source code of Greasemetal is available at http://kazuho.31tools.com/svn/chromemonkey/. For more information, please refer to the developer's weblog.