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How to manage Greasemonkey scripts

Greasemonkey userscripts are a snap to manage. Learn how to disable, uninstall, and tweak your userscripts.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor

Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.

Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms

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Matt Elliott

Jan. 18, 2013 2:45 p.m. PT

Once you have waded into the Greasemonkey waters, you may quickly find yourself in pretty deep. The userscripts are easy to install, and there are literally thousands of them. Thankfully, the Greasemonkey add-on makes it easy to manage.

To access Greasemonkey's management pane, click on the downward arrow on the right side of the button Greasemonkey to the right of your URL bar and select Manage User Scripts. This opens a tab with a list of your scripts. For each script, you'll find a button to disable or uninstall it. There is also a Preferences button for each script, which lets you manually include or exclude pages for it to run on, but I doubt many people will tinker with this.

In addition to letting you manage your userscripts, the menu accessed from the Greasemonkey button lets you go to Greasemonkey options and add a new userscript (of your own devising). At the bottom, it also shows you which scripts are running on the page you are currently viewing.

While you can disable scripts individually, you can also disable all of them simply by clicking on the Greasemonkey button. With the monkey icon faded out, you know that all of your Greasemonkey scripts are disabled. Click on the button again to enable your scripts. To uninstall the Greasemonkey add-on itself, go to Tools > Add-ons and remove it.