Here’s what I found on the other side. Vibe: "I have nothing to hide because you can read my source code."

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.

Greasemonkey is the original. Created in 2005, it birthed the entire userscript ecosystem. But while Tampermonkey added bells and whistles, Greasemonkey stayed minimalist— too minimalist for some.

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.

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.

I clicked "OK" for the tenth time that month. But this time, I paused.

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."

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.