Stylish for Firefox

[seanboi.shaffer]

Stylish is an addon for Mozilla Firefox. An introduction to Stylish, taken from the addon 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.

Stylish is a must-have addon for any Firefox user, whether you're new to addons or not. I will list some useful userstyles for Stylish and then point out resources where you can get information related to writing your own userstyles, backing up your userstyles and so on.

To start, here are some userstyles I think anyone would find useful:

Statusbar: Mouseover for clutter
Basically it hides all the statusbar items except those that are in plain vanilla Firefox... until you mouseover, then the statusbar returns to its normal clutter so you can use all the items there.

Google Search Columnized
Makes Google Search results use 2 columns, and removes some redundant info, making it look cleaner.

Ad Blocking FiltersetP
This is FiltersetP without the need for the AdBlock extension.

Ad blocking per Gozer
Wrosk alongside FiltersetP to hide even more ads on sites such as Google, Yahoo, Digg, etc.

Bright Focus (for buttons, links, and textboxes)
Changes the outline color to reflect the new rgba CSS3 color standard supported by Firefox 3

Check marking visited links (with custom color)
Places a small check mark next to links that have been visited and changes the color of the text.

Cursor indicator
A cursor indicator for hyperlinks of file extension: pdf, doc, xls, txt, zip, exe and e-mail

FTP:// and FILE:// - beautifier ("were awfull" 2)
Make directory listings from ftp and the local system look nicer.

Italicize unread tabs
Italicizes the title of tabs that are yet unread.

Modern-Wiki[SSB] - SlimSearchBar
A clean undisturbing style for Wikipedia.org, intended for wikipedia-r e a d e r s; it hides most of the additional (rarely used) links/tools and provides a fixed searchbar on top.

painted black - forms
Global style for all forms. HTTP (clear-text) forms are grayscale. HTTPS (encrypted) forms are in dark greens. Backgrounds, color, and border/outlining are the only styling done by this. The rest is left to the page or your other userstyles.

Rounded Forms for FF3
Rounds corners and adjusts appearance of textarea, select, input, and button fields. Changes borders/outline/background color when hovered. Resulting eye-candy is somewhat Safari-like. Applies globally, but you can exclude sites or apply it only to selected sites.

Scrollbar - Gray
The scrollbar background is transparent and will take on your system window bg. You can change this - the first block of code or play with system display/window colors.

Yellow https location bar
Turns the location bar yellow when using an encrypted connection to a web site--meaning, its address starts with https://

That's it for my list of must-have userstyles. There are many more that can be added. I just listed the ones that would be most useful to all users.

You can browse more userstyles at UserStyles.org

That site also lists useful links on the homepage for the definition of a user style, how to use Stylish, how to navigate the UserStyles.org website and how to code a user style.

See here for tips on customizing Stylish 1.0. If you're a power user, check out the Stylish Power Pack.

The Stylish-Custom addon adds features such as an improved Update Scripts code, Import/Export of Stylish userstyles and a lot more.

[George]

I like the Stylish Add-on as well. However, I must heavily complain about the userstyles.org site when you search for a stylish script. The search function there is pretty much useless. Whatever you select, the outcome is cluttered with stuff you don't searched for, thus you have to page through endless pages guessing by the titles what the script would probably do. I actually gave up several times and will probably not go back there.

[Terarus]

Does Stylish pose any security concerns?

[mr6n8]

Originally Posted by George

I like the Stylish Add-on as well. However, I must heavily complain about the userstyles.org site when you search for a stylish script. The search function there is pretty much useless. Whatever you select, the outcome is cluttered with stuff you don't searched for, thus you have to page through endless pages guessing by the titles what the script would probably do. I actually gave up several times and will probably not go back there.

I agree. I found the site extremely confusing and not helpful at all.
There is more useful information in seanboi.shaffer's post here then I found on the whole site.

[seanboi.shaffer]

I also believe that UserStyles.org is a mess. It took me about a week to finally find all of the userstyles that I use now. I do not know how much it will help but if you feel like browsing userstyles.org and want it to be a little cleaner, you can take a look at this userstyle.

Along with that addon, I use these userstyles to make UserStyles.org a bit cleaner, easier to read, etc.

userstyles.org - redesign of stars
Userstyles.org - Dark Shiny Blue, transparency

As for finding styles, all I did was right-click the Stylish icon that appears in your statusbar after installation, go up and click on "Find styles for this site..." and voila! The addon will open a new tab and import the URL of that chosen page into the search field at UserStyles.org and display results. That does help some.

[seanboi.shaffer]

Originally Posted by George

I like the Stylish Add-on as well. However, I must heavily complain about the userstyles.org site when you search for a stylish script. The search function there is pretty much useless. Whatever you select, the outcome is cluttered with stuff you don't searched for, thus you have to page through endless pages guessing by the titles what the script would probably do. I actually gave up several times and will probably not go back there.

One thing that might help is to use the Preview button that appears when you attempt to install a style. It will allow you to see what that userstyle does without actually installing it. Pretty handy, I must say. Works well for determining if a new userstyle you want to install will conflict with other userstyles, GreaseMonkey scripts or installed addons.

[J_L]

If you guys don't like the userstyles.org search, you can Google search within that site. To do that, type your search term, press space, type site:userstyles.org, and press enter. It should work for all other sites within the Google search database.

As for Styler itself, I don't think I need something like that. Unnecessary visual improvements doesn't interest me.

[seanboi.shaffer]

Anyone that needs help finding a userstyle for use with this addon, please let me know. There are several resources available (userstyles.org, deviantart.com, etc.) and I am more than willing to assit anyone who may need it. Simply send me a PM and tell me what website you want a style for, what you'd like the style to do (change the appearance, remove an element, etc.) and i will reply with a list of styles that you may find helpful. I use over 70 UserStyles myself, along with 22 Greasemonkey Scripts so I have spent quite a bit of time scouring the UserStyles.org website.

[seanboi.shaffer]

Originally Posted by Terarus

Does Stylish pose any security concerns?

Userstyles use CSS to perform the visual modifications. The CSS Code tells the site to load something differently or show something in a different color. There is no concern about security threats because the only thing a page can load that isn't code-based are pictures, as far as I can tell. You still want to use real-time protection on your machine. I would recommend anti-virus and anti-spyware protection as well as a firewall. There are addons available for Firefox that will add to your local protection as well. To name a few:

Adblock Plus
BetterPrivacy
Dr.Web Link Check
KeyScrambler
LinkExtend
Secure Login
Targeted ACO
TrackMeNot
Web Of Trust

[rhiannon]

Greasemonkey has a good selection of scripts. Many of the scripts work on both Stylish and Greasemonkey.

The Firefox Addon is here:
Greasemonkey

Scripts are here:

UserScripts.org

Script suggestions:
Online Tech Tips list:
25 Useful Greasemonkey Scripts

Lifehacker List:
Lifehacker Top Ten for 2009