I see a white page and I want to paint it black…

Yes, I know this is not the post that people voted for in my previous missive, but y’know what, it’s an easy one that I’ll be able to crank out quickly and get me back in the groove of blogging. There’s more substantial stuff on the way, I promise. So without further ado…

Firefox Howto: Getting started with Stylish

What’s Sylish? From the download page: “Stylish allows easy management of user styles. User styles empower your browsing experience by letting you fix ugly sites, customize the look of your browser or mail client, or just have fun. With an online repository at userstyles.org, you don’t even need to know how to write styles yourself; just a couple clicks and the chosen style is applied. Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, and unlike other methods of using user styles, most styles take effect immediately.”

Get that? It makes shit look different. A particular site, or certain aspects of sites (I’ve got a style that marks all password fields in red, for instance), Firefox itself, even other extensions. Sound fun? Let’s do it.

1. Head back to that download page, hit the big green button that says Install, and restart Firefox.
2. Over at userstyles.org you will find thousands of user-submitted styles. You’ll want to bookmark this and come back and browse later (if you need some ideas to get started, at the end of this post I list all the styles that I’m using right now).
3. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be installing a style from the popular Painted Black series, contributed by whatrevolution? I’ve been following this user’s work for some time, and it’s incredible. In the top right corner, enter “painted black” in the search bar and away we go.
4. We are going to install Painted Black – Userstyles (I know, very meta of me), so go ahead and click into that link. You’ll see a brief description, a couple of screenshots, and a button that says Install. Guess that you’re gonna do next?
5. It’s magic! The page changes instantly!
6. Go back to the main page and blow the rest of your day trying out new themes!

Here’s a list of themes I’m using now. I’m not going to link them because there’s a ton and I’m lazy, but you can damn well search for them yourself. Have fun!

• Remove star button FF3
• Ffx context-menu: extreme minimalism!
• ‘New Facebook’ – Remove Ads
• about:microsoft
• BBC News – Fluid Layout
• Better Selected Text
• Bright Focus (for buttons, links, and textboxes)
• Center images
• Download Statusbar – move buttons/add icons
• Google Image Search – dark gray redesign (vC)
• Google Web Search – dark grey for Googlepedia
• Goosh – Black & Green Style
• Hide the search button
• Identify password fields
• IMDB – Dark grey improved
• IMDB.com – adblocked & tweaked
• painted black – forms
• painted black – freshmeat
• painted black – isohunt
• painted black – The Register
• painted black – txt (any plain text) + view source
• painted black – userstyles ( entire site )
• painted black Userscripts.org – RE-FIXED
• Remove the home button
• Remove the RSS feed icon button from Firefox 3 & 2
• Search engine manager – resized
• SKYY’s Dark Wikipedia
• Slim extension list 2
• Tab Visualization Improvements
• This Page Intentionally Left Blank – Silver
• Toolbars – Buttons Closer For Firefox 2.0 (note: yes, it works for Firefox 3)
• ubuntuforums.org grey
• Userstyles.org – tweaked

I told you it was a shitload, didn’t I? Most of them are darker themes for sites I frequent (I’ve got a CRT monitor, white backgrounds burn my eyeballs out) and interface de-crappifiers for Firefox.

I certainly don’t guarantee that all these styles will be to your taste, but if nothing else it’s indicative of just how many styles there are to choose from. That’s the cool thing about free software, right? You can make it yours in so many ways. Enjoy!

-p.