The best Tampermonkey scripts for a work day in the browser

Every list of the best Tampermonkey scripts has the same shape. Ten entries, a screenshot each, and no explanation of why those ten. The result is a set of installs that sit in the dashboard for a year, half of them broken by site redesigns, none of them removing more than a second from the day.

The install numbers on Greasy Fork explain why. They are public, they are ranked, and they point somewhere most of these lists do not go. What follows uses those numbers, read on 26 September 2026, to separate the scripts people install from the scripts that earn their place in a working week, and covers the permission Chrome now requires before any of them will run at all.

The most installed scripts are not work scripts

Sorting Greasy Fork by total installs gives a clear picture of what userscripts are mostly used for. Of the 50 most installed scripts on that list, more than half are media downloaders, video player tweaks, advertisement and link bypassers, or game mods. The top entry, at 3,431,174 total installs, rewrites search result pages for Baidu, Sogou, Google and Haosou. Two entries near the top, at 2,231,284 and 1,020,092 installs, exist to lift copy and right click restrictions on web pages.

Scripts aimed at work are a thin slice. Two of the top 50 are pagination scripts. Two are helpers for GitHub. One is a search engine switcher. That is roughly it.

This is not a criticism of the catalogue, it is a reading instruction. A list of the best Tampermonkey scripts sorted by popularity is a list of consumer tools, and copying it produces a browser full of things that do nothing for a work day. The useful scripts for a specific job are further down, with install counts in the hundreds or the dozens, and they have to be found by job rather than by rank.

The pagination category shows the spread clearly, and it is the one category where the popular and the specialised overlap.

Script	Total installs	What it does
AutoPager	580,064	Loads the next page automatically on a wide set of sites
Pagetual	463,848	Same job, with rules that can be extended per site
AutoPagerize	6,844	The original implementation of the idea

Three scripts, one job, install counts two orders of magnitude apart. Rank says nothing here about which one fits.

The five jobs worth a script

Userscripts are worth writing or installing for a narrow set of problems. Anything outside these is usually better handled by an extension or by a change in habit.

Removing a repeated click

The clearest win is a click that happens dozens of times a day and cannot be configured away. Pagination is the classic case: a long list of search results, a ticket queue or a documentation index that arrives ten rows at a time. A pagination script turns that into one scroll.

Reshaping a page that a team lives in

Web applications are built for the median user, and a team that uses one all day accumulates a list of small complaints that the vendor will not act on. Scripts like Show all Jira Cloud comments exist for exactly this, and its total install count of 39 is the point rather than a warning. It was written by someone with the same problem, for a handful of people who share it.

Getting data out in a usable format

A large share of office time is spent copying something out of a browser and into a document. Scripts such as Copy table as Markdown, at 22 total installs, convert an HTML table in place rather than through a round trip via a spreadsheet. The install count says almost nobody knows it exists, not that it fails.

Removing something the page insists on showing

Banners, interstitials, autoplaying video and cookie notices all cost attention. This is the category where extensions usually do a better job, because they are maintained by teams and updated when sites change. A script makes sense here only when the target is one internal site that no extension will ever cover.

Adding a keyboard route to something mouse only

Web applications frequently expose a function through a menu three levels deep and nowhere else. A dozen lines of script can bind it to a key. This is the smallest category and the most durable, because keyboard handlers break less often than layout selectors.

Chrome now requires a permission before any script runs

This is the part that has changed and the reason why some installs quietly do nothing. Tampermonkey's own documentation states the requirement.

For users of the Tampermonkey extension (version 5.3+) in a Chrome-based browser, enabling either the "Allow User Scripts" toggle (available in Chrome 138+ via extension settings) or Developer Mode is required. Source: tampermonkey.net

The reason given is a two step authorisation: the userScripts permission on its own does not produce a warning at install time, so the browser asks for a second, deliberate action. The toggle is found by right clicking the Tampermonkey icon, choosing Manage Extension, and enabling Allow User Scripts.

The practical consequence is that a script installed on a fresh Mac will appear in the dashboard, show as enabled, and never execute until that toggle is on. Anyone debugging a script that does nothing should check this before reading a line of code.

Tampermonkey also ships in more than one build, which matters for anyone still running older scripts. Its download page lists Tampermonkey for Chrome 120 and later, Tampermonkey Legacy for Chrome 71 and later, and a beta channel. The extension is available for Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Opera Next and Firefox.

How to judge a script before installing it

A userscript runs with the ability to read and change the pages it matches, so the decision is closer to hiring than to shopping.

Check the match scope first. Greasy Fork shows an Applies to field on every script page. A script that says one domain is a bounded risk. A script that says All sites has a reason to, such as a pagination or table conversion tool, and that reason should be obvious from the description.

Check the last update date against the sites it targets. A script written for a web application that has redesigned twice since will fail silently, which is worse than failing loudly, because the page simply behaves as it did before.

Check whether the install count matches the intent. A single maintainer with 39 installs is normal for a script aimed at one product. A script offering to remove restrictions across the whole web with millions of installs is a different proposition, and the size of the audience is not reassurance.

Tampermonkey's own features help here. There is a blacklist for sites that no userscript should ever touch, automatic update checks on a configurable interval, an ESLint syntax check in the built in editor, and three configuration modes so that advanced options stay hidden until wanted. Setting the blacklist before installing anything is the cheapest safety measure available, and it takes about a minute for the handful of sites that hold banking or administrative access.

Writing one is smaller than installing one

For a job that is specific to one internal tool, writing the script is often faster than searching for it, and Tampermonkey is set up for that.

A userscript is a JavaScript file with a header block. The header is where most of the decisions live. A match pattern states which URLs the script runs on, and keeping it as narrow as possible is both a safety measure and a debugging aid. A run-at value states whether the code executes before the page renders or after it settles, which is usually the difference between a script that works and one that runs against elements that do not exist yet. A grant list states which of Tampermonkey's own functions the script is allowed to call, such as clipboard access or storage.

The editing environment is already in the extension. Tampermonkey includes a CodeMirror editor with an ESLint syntax check, which catches the class of mistake that otherwise shows up as a page that silently does nothing. Automatic update checks run on a configurable interval, so a script hosted somewhere with a version number keeps itself current across every machine it is installed on.

For anything past a few dozen lines, the extension documents two escape routes from its own editor. File access can be enabled so that a script pulls in a local copy of itself, which makes an external editor the working environment and the browser just the runtime. There is also a separate Tampermonkey Editors extension for editing scripts at vscode.dev.

One more detail saves time on older code. Tampermonkey ships a compatibility layer for scripts written for Greasemonkey 3.x and earlier, and states that it tries to detect which options are needed automatically. A script from 2014 that fails is more likely failing on the site than on the API.

Where scripts follow you, and where they stop

A userscript is installed into an extension, and an extension is installed into a browser profile. That boundary decides more about daily use than the script itself.

Two profiles on the same Mac do not share scripts. Neither do two browsers. Tampermonkey addresses this with a sync feature that copies scripts between installations, and with export and import for manual moves. That works, and it also means a script written for an internal tool gets copied into a profile where it will run against a site it was never tested on.

This matters for anyone who already separates work from personal accounts by profile, because the separation is the reason scripts stop appearing where they are expected. The alternative arrangement is to give each web application its own window and its own session, which keeps accounts apart without multiplying the number of places a script has to be installed. The Features page describes how that is set up, and the Built-in terminal page covers the case where a script has grown past what a browser should be doing and belongs in a shell instead.

That last point deserves stating plainly. A script that fetches, parses and files data is a program, and a program that runs inside a page breaks every time the page changes. Moving it to a scheduled command is more work once and less work every month after.

What to change first

Open the Tampermonkey dashboard, sort by last used, and remove everything that has not run in a month, because each one is a page rewrite waiting to go wrong. Then check the Allow User Scripts toggle, since anything installed recently may never have run at all. If the browser has become the place where all of the work happens, SpaceDeck is built to keep those applications in separate windows rather than one long row of tabs.