Ever since my offer on Lifehacker, some people have written to me requesting SkipScreen as a userscript for Greasemonkey.

But as it turns out, the greasemonkey script is right under your nose. Just download the SkipScreen .XPI file here and unzip it using 7zip or Stuffit. The skipscreen.js file is inside the “content” folder.   

The drawbacks of using SkipScreen in Greasemonkey: no notification of new versions, and the upcoming preferences menu won’t work. That is, you’ll be able to turn sites on and off individually using Greasemonkey’s own options, but any options specific to a site (like “listen first”, once we’ve implemented it) won’t work.

Can you help us kick the tires on new features?

We’re always working on new features, so we could use a few brave souls to help test SkipScreen. Can you help? Email us! skipper+betatest@skipscreen.com and download the self-updating, forever beta release of Skipscreen (this will sometimes have serious bugs, so you’ll want to be on our email list for tips on how to use it).

Being a beta tester would involve, um, going to lots of sites and downloading stuff.  Which isn’t a a terrible way to spend a Tuesday and Wednesday evening.

The latest SkipScreen just got pushed out of the sandbox! This is actually the most recent of two releases and includes lots of good stuff, including Rapidshare reloads, support for skipping the infamous Diggbar, and lots more.

Next week’s release will include the much-requested preferences menu for turning SkipScreen on and off for specific sites. And we’ll probably find time to add support for one more download site. Stay tuned!

It’s always tough to have a hot new feature waiting in the Sandbox. In the latest version of SkipScreen (available here to logged in users) when you open a bunch of Rapidshare links at once, SkipScreen will reload each link once per minute until all links have begun downloading.

Rapidshare is by far the most popular of all the one-click hosting services, so we’re really happy this feature is in there. And we’ll be even happier when the update goes out to all users

The most requested feature so far (other than adding support for a specific site) has been the ability to turn SkipScreen on and off for specific sites. This should be done by next week. Yay!

Say you have a Rapidshare Premium account, and don’t want SkipScreen to click “free user”. Or say you want to pick the download site yourself on Sharebee. Or say SkipScreen is temporarily broken on a site and we haven’t released the fix yet (oops). All of these annoyances are easily resolved by turning off SkipScreen for that site.

Someday soon we’ll offer more advanced options than just “on” and “off”. Like “Listen First” on sites that let you stream mp3s before downloading. Or the option to pick a favorite site on Sharebee, if you have a premium account for one of the services. But we think a simple set of on / off switches goes a long way.

Also: the preference pane will let you turn the post-download page on and off. We’ve had requests to make the post-download page more accessible–it’s handy to have a search engine just for SkipScreen-supported sites. But some people don’t like the aesthetics, or worry that all their base will belong to Google, so to speak. Since people have strong feelings both ways, we’ll leave the choice up to you!

Lastly, if you’re a fan of SkipScreen, we could use a little love in the Mozilla Addons directory. Some folks just unleashed with the ALLCAPS and the unfounded accusations. Write a review!

Skipscreen just made this great list of Firefox Plugins for Music Lovers put together by these folks.

Just another reminder that music exploration on the web is not nearly as easy as it should be. And that Firefox addons (like Skipscreen!) can make everything much easier.

Woops… sorry about that.

100,000 downloads, in not much more than a week.

Thanks so much to everybody for trying / reviewing / sharing / blogging SkipScreen!

You can report a skipscreen bug by emailing skipper@skipscreen.com or at getsatisfaction.com/skipscreen

Here are some things to include when submitting a bug report to SkipScreen. Sometimes it’s really confusing figuring out what went wrong.

1. What page were you on?

• What page you were on (“RapidShare” is good, but http://rapidshare.com/files/117412687/Firefox.Setup.3.0.rar.html” is better.)
• Do you have any form of membership or registration for this site?
• Is the site on our Handled List (see the SkipScreen homepage)
• What you did (eg, “nothing, I waited for it to work” or “I entered the captcha, hit enter, then clicked the download button”)
• What happened next (were there any error messages? Did the save-file dialog appear? What was shown on-screen? Can you provide a screenshot?)
• What you expected to happen.

2. Other extensions?

• Are you running any other download-helper extensions?
• Are you running Greasemonkey?
• If so, what scripts do you have enabled?

3. Platform / Firefox version:

• OperatingSystem (eg, Windows XP, Mac OS X, etc)
• Firefox Version (3.0.7, 2.5.6, etc) – go to Help >> About Mozilla Firefox
• SkipScreen Version (go to Tools >> Addons >> SkipScreen [if not visible, right-click >> About] )

4. Now we need to check the error-console.

• Go to Tools >> Addons >> Error Console (the shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-J or CMD-Shift-J on Mac)
• Scroll to the last entry that mentions SkipScreen, right-click >> copy
• Now paste into your bug-report.

The latest SkipScreen just went live today, so you should get the update automatically. It includes a simple, easy-on-the-eyes post download page.

The post-download page includes tools for sharing a link with friends (lots of services–megaupload to name one–lack this. WTF, right?). It also includes a search bar for searching for files on skipscreen-compatible sites. Now that skipscreen makes it easier to download files from these services, you might as well download more stuff, right? That’s how it’s been for me, at least.

And we threw in torrent search, just to remind everybody that there are still plenty of ways to share files that don’t involve unnecessary pages and countdowns.

Perhaps the most important thing about this update is that it will make SkipScreen less confusing for Rapidshare users by removing the RapidShare “download” button (the one you can’t really click until after the countdown completes anyway) and putting a note on the Rapidshare countdown page reminding people to sit back and let SkipScreen do its thing.