The immensely popular Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox users is coming to Google Chrome thanks to Aaron Boodman, who developed Greasemonkey in the first place. Boodman works at Google on the Gears project has contributed to the development of what will become a native Greasemonkey support rolled out in future Chrome versions. It is part of a broader Google move to enable more plug-ins in Chrome and introduce a new extensions API to open Chrome to third-party add-ons.

Greasemonkey support currently exists only in open source developer Chrome builds called Chromium and will be introduced in future shipping consumer versions of Chrome, Boodman said. Those who want to try it out today need to grab a copy of the Google Chrome Channel Chooser tool available at the Dev Channel site. The application offers a choice between a beta channel for access to less frequent, but more stable Chrome releases or the developer channel that publishes Chrome builds every week with new features that are yet to appear in the shipping version of Chrome. Chromium builds can be run with Greasemonkey through the "--enable-greasemonkey" option.

Google plans to roll out Greasemonkey support in the near future in a public version of Chrome and add functionality such as live scripts updating and restricting a script to a particular site.