Firefox Extension Highlight: Stylish
I’ve decided on a bi-weekly segment (a loosely defined deadline) for jmcom highlighting a specific Firefox extensions that I enjoy. I dislike all the “Top X extensions you will have a mob come and rape you to death if you don’t have it” articles, the whole point of extensions are that they are not necessary for everyone, but are useful to at least someone. I want to focus on one extension at a time as I feel some extensions don’t get the exposure they should. The first installment it going to focus on a wonderful little extension called Stylish.
Review after jumpOn the surface the extension itself is not really that impressive, it is basically a container for all your “user styles” which are essentially Cascading Style Sheets that can impose your will on any and all websites. Don’t like the font of this site? That’s fine you can change it to whatever you want. Depending on you skill level with CSS you can do some pretty amazing things to websites. If you go over to userstyles.org you can find a huge repository of user styles already created by other users. A lot of styles focus on removing unnecessary junk from websites to varying degrees, some change the whole layout, and others add useful little features. But ultimately it gives the user a wide and dynamic range of control over websites, no longer are you bound to look at some ugly website, you can change it in a way that pleases your eyes. You can use this functionality without the use of Stylish but it’s pretty cumbersome which involves locating your profile directory and editing a css file containing all your different rules. Stylish, however, keeps all the different rules organized and seperate allowing you to easily find and edit a rule one at a time. It also allows you to disable the rule from the status bar of the browser window, as well as previewing and finding styles (from userstyles.org for a specific website that you may be browsing.) And to top things off you can stay current with styles that you’ve downloaded from the userstyles.org website with an updater built into the extension.
In all this modest little extension should be a welcome addition to anyone’s browser, knowledge level of CSS is not necessary as there are hundreds of people out there doing all the work for you already. Have a look at the userstyles.org website for ideas and instruction on how to make your own styles, and if you’re like me you’ll have tonnes of fun re-working websites and seeing what kinds of tricks you can do.
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