Customizing an operating system has always been popular. There are many tools and many preconfigured styles out there. Stylish is the same thing, but for websites. On its companion site Userstyles.org you can find hundreds of pre-build styles for many websites. There are many pointless Facebook styles and gimmicky changes, but between those lie the pearls that are really worth checking out.
Basically Stylish applies custom CSS style sheets to the websites you specify. For some reason I thought the option to specify personal styles had always existed in browser (and Firefox in particular), but I couldn’t find much information on it. In any case, Stylish makes adding new CSS sheets extremely easy. It also has a few style management functions that allow you to select if and when CSS files should be active.
Two styles I’m currently trying out and which I really like are:
- Gawker Blogs – Minus Garbage Plus Width: If you’re following my Google Reader shared items, you might have noticed I’m a pretty faithful Gizmodo reader. While I like many of their articles (especially the longer, more thought out ones), I hate their design. This custom style is a godsend if I want to go and check out the comments on the site.
- Google Reader simple and clean: Google Reader is already a fairly minimalist application, but this style goes even further. Only try this if you like white and pure content.
Feel free to share your favorites in the comments. I’d love to discover some other ones.