The 4.0 rewrite broke thousands of scripts by removing GM_* APIs. The community panicked. Many left. But if you only need simple DOM manipulation and hate feature creep, Greasemonkey is still a masterpiece of focus.
Here’s what I found on the other side. Vibe: "I have nothing to hide because you can read my source code."
I switched to for daily driving. It feels like Tampermonkey from 2018—before the feature bloat, before the telemetry fears. But I keep ScriptCat in a portable Firefox install for those late-night automation experiments. tampermonkey alternative
Violentmonkey is the ethical hacker’s Tampermonkey. It does 95% of what Tampermonkey does, but with zero proprietary bloat. The permissions model is stricter, the update checks are transparent, and the code is lean enough to run on a Raspberry Pi.
AdGuard’s browser extension isn't just for blocking ads. It has a hidden userscript engine that supports most Tampermonkey APIs. The killer feature? It runs before the page loads. Tampermonkey waits for DOM readiness; AdGuard injects at the network level. But if you only need simple DOM manipulation
I clicked "OK" for the tenth time that month. But this time, I paused.
Tampermonkey had been my loyal companion for years. It injected life into boring web apps, scraped data that wasn't meant to be scraped, and turned Reddit into a usable website. But lately, something felt… off. The extension grew heavier. The sync features demanded Google Drive or OneDrive access. And the Chrome Web Store reviews whispered of "telemetry" and "tracking domains." It feels like Tampermonkey from 2018—before the feature
Here’s an interesting, story-driven write-up on Tampermonkey alternatives, framed as a user’s quest for the perfect userscript manager. It started with a single pop-up. Not an ad—worse. A nag screen inside my developer tools: "Tampermonkey has been updated. Please review the new permissions."