Stylish is a user style manager that can change the appearance of web pages in a user's browser without changing their content by including user-supplied CSS style sheets with those supplied by the web site itself. The Stylish

browser extension A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and st ...

includes tools with which to write user styles, and can install user styles written by other Stylish users from a companion website. These user styles may be more or less selective, targeting just one web page, or all of the pages on a domain, or every page on the web. Stylish was originally developed by Jason Barnabe as an XUL/

XPCOM Cross Platform Component Object Model (XPCOM) is a cross-platform component model from Mozilla. It is similar to Component Object Model (COM), Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and system object model (SOM). It features multiple ...

add-on for

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

. A Chrome extension followed in 2010, which was released for

Blink Blinking is a bodily function; it is a semi-autonomic rapid closing of the eyelid. A single blink is determined by the forceful closing of the eyelid or inactivation of the levator palpebrae superioris and the activation of the palpebral por ...

-based

Opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...

15 in 2013 and as a Firefox WebExtension in 2017. Similar extensions for

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

and for Presto-based Opera are distributed as 'Stylish' by other developers with Barnabe's approval.

Technical details

User styles are CSS code designed to alter the appearance of one, some, or all sites. Stylish for Firefox can additionally style the skin of the browser itself, but the Android version does not support this because the user interface is built in native Android code. The styles are applied only to the targets specified. Individual user styles can be enabled or disabled without having to restart the browser. User styles are added to the CSS rules provided by the site, but can also override the site's styling (often requiring the !important keyword for each replacement rule). The most common uses are

ad blocking Ad blocking (or ad filtering) is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a History of the web browser, web browser, an Application software, application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or othe ...

, applying a new color scheme, and eliminating unwanted page elements. There are three classes of user styles. Site styles change the appearance of a particular web site. Global styles change the appearance of all web sites. App styles change the appearance of the Firefox user interface, only supported on Firefox. It is similar to the userChrome.css CSS file used by Firefox and Mozilla-based browsers.

Privacy issues

In September 2016 Jason Barnabe, the creator of Stylish and userstyles.org, announced that, having lost interest in the project, he had "chosen Justin Hindman as the next leader of Stylish and userstyles.org." Hindman had no prior connection to either Stylish or userstyles.org, and it soon became clear that Barnabe had simply sold them to Hindman in a straw purchase for Israeli

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data, which also falls under and directly relates to the umbrella term, data sc ...

company SimilarWeb. In December 2016 Hindman began releasing updates to Stylish for Chrome which returned a perfect replica of the user's browsing activity to Userstyles. On 3 January 2017 he announced a "partnership" with SimilarWeb in which "Stylish users ouldbe joining SimilarWeb’s market research panel.". A Firefox web extension (3.0.1) was released on 10 November, after a final update (2.1.1) to the Stylish XUL+XPCOM add-on on 31 October to migrate user styles to a webextension-compatible database. In July 2018, after these issues were publicized by a software engineer, Stylish was pulled from both the Chrome Web Store and

Mozilla Add-ons For Mozilla software, an add-on is a software component that extends the functionality of the Firefox web browser and related applications although most are browser extensions. Mozilla provides add-ons to users via its official add-on website. I ...

, as well as being automatically uninstalled for all existing users. Stylish returned to Mozilla Add-ons on 16 August and to the Chrome Web Store on 5 November with the same logic but sporting a new opt-in page asking users to agree to the data collection when the extension was installed. Firefox now reports fewer users of Stylish than its more popular alternative,

Stylus A stylus is a writing utensil or tool for scribing or marking into softer materials. Different styluses were used to write in cuneiform by pressing into wet clay, and to scribe or carve into a wax tablet. Very hard styluses are also used to En ...

Alternatives to Stylish

A userscript manager such as Greasemonkey or

Tampermonkey Tampermonkey is a closed-source donationware userscript manager that is available as a browser extension. This software enables the user to add and use userscripts, which are JavaScript programs that can be used to modify web pages. History Tamp ...

can add a local style sheet to a web page by adding the style sheet content to an HTML tag and adding the tag to the page. User styles from Userstyles.org can be downloaded as user scripts for use with a userscript manager.

Ad blocker Ad blocking (or ad filtering) is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a web browser, an application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or other methods or browsers with inside blocking. Hist ...

s such as

UBlock Origin uBlock Origin ( ) is a free and open-source browser extension for content filtering, including ad blocking. The extension is available for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers (such as Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera). uBlock Origin is activ ...

allow user-definable filters that can modify site's CSS. Alternative user style managers include

and xStyle, which are derived from Stylish for Chrome, aStyle, reStyle, and Website Theme Manager. In Firefox, user styles for web sites and browser chrome can be added to local files userContent.css or userChrome.css, respectively. As of Firefox 69, user must switch the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets preference to true in about:config in order to load these files.

References

External links

*{{Official website Free Firefox WebExtensions Google Chrome extensions Cascading Style Sheets 2005 software

Technical details

Privacy issues

Alternatives to Stylish

See also

References

External links