I’ve written several scripts before and have been doing such modifications in the “load” event handler, as in this script. The problem is that “load” event is fired after all images on the page have been downloaded completely, so users may suffer a great delay to see the changes occur if there’re many images.

jQuery users know that jQuery has a function “ready”. It won’t wait for the images to load. We are writing Greasemonkey scripts, so we only care about Firefox. Firefox has a “DOMContentLoaded” event explained in detail here.

Fired on a Window object when a document’s DOM content is finished loaded, but unlike “load”, does not wait till all images are loaded. Used for example by GreaseMonkey to sneak in to alter pages before they are displayed.

So when writing my last script I tried to rely on this event:

window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(e) {
	...
}, false);

But the codes in the handler were not executed.

I was confused and did some searching. Finally I got this page saying that “the code in a Greasemonkey user script gets invoked when the DOMContentLoaded event fires”. That explains all. The “DOMContentLoaded” event was already fired so the codes never had a chance to get executed.

The solution, of course, is pulling the handler codes out of the wrapper. If your script doesn’t really rely on the “load” event, don’t put them into its handler because there may be a obvious delay.

The script checks for the unread count every 8 minutes. But after you click the “Reader” link, it checks the count 1 minute later and extend the interval by 1 minute after every check until the interval returns to 8 minutes again.

Install Greasemonkey，and then install this script。

Page on userscripts.org.

However the panel above the subscription list takes up too much space for my humble screen resolution of 1024×768. As Google rolled out the much complained “Friends’ shared items” feature, it became an urgent task for me to hide the annoying but never used panel. It took up 1/3 of the vertical space on the left sidebar!

No, not just hiding. Sometimes I need to clear the number of unread friends’ shared items. So it should be a “toggler” like the sidebar (or nav-bar as called by Google) toggler natively built in Google Reader. Like this:

Before hiding, with mouse hovering on the toggler:

When the panel is hidden:

You can still open it at any time. Basically, it works in the same way as the native sidebar toggler.

This is done by writing a user script for Greasemonkey, so you must have Greasemonkey installed to use it.

Get it now.