In July 2005, serious vulnerabilities were found in Greasemonkey by Mark Pilgrim, and fixed in the 3.5 version of Greasemonkey. By May 2005, there were approximately 60 general and 115 site-specific userscripts distributed for Greasemonkey. Boodman was inspired to write Greasemonkey after looking at a Firefox extension designed to clean up the interface of AllMusic, written by Adrian Holovaty, who later became a userscript developer. The Greasemonkey project began 28 November 2004, written by Aaron Boodman. Greasemonkey can be used for customizing page appearance, adding new functions to web pages (for example, embedding price comparisons within shopping sites), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple web pages, and numerous other purposes. The changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is viewed, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script. It enables users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content after or before the page is loaded in the browser (also known as augmented browsing). Greasemonkey is a userscript manager made available as a Mozilla Firefox extension.
