Customizing Webpages (Firefox)

Didn't know where else to put this. Anyway, I realize there are quite a lot of people who prefer darker colors on websites, so I'd like to point you to the Firefox addon Greasemonkey. You can find custom scripts on userscripts.org for all kinds of websites.

I've only been using one script so far, namely this one:

YouTube Comfort In Black.


With a black background you can see the videos much better, plus it makes the video window much larger.

On a related note, I've experienced crashes on youtube for a while in Firefox. Don't know if it still exists, but there was a problem with a file on that site, which could be fixed by blocking the object http://*.ytimg.com/yt/swf/PMS*.swf with Adblock.

I both love and hate this feature.

Love: Stuff like the YouTube Comfort in Black is pretty cool. There are also some other sites that I look at that I style a bit different for ease on my eyes.

Hate: I do some freelance web work and web work for a couple of the organizations I am involved in. When users start customizing how they view your site, it generally doesn't change much, but occasionally it can cause problems (especially if they heavily stylize it). It wouldn't be so bad, accept that I saw from another site I post on that someone was badmouthing one of the sites I work on. After a little investigation, it turned out that he had used a customized style sheet to view our sight and some of the styles he was overriding were causing the format problems! It would have been funny (the guy did apologize for badmouthing our site finally) accept that I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why this guy was having problems. It was pretty frustrating until I finally got a screen shot from him and immediately realized that he was doing something on his end.

I've been using scripts for a year and I love them.There is a Firefox addon called Stylish which is very easy to use and updates whenever there's a new version of Firefox(in case you beta-test).

userstyles.org is a very good site for scripts.

Google Web Search - dark gray redesign (vC) is by far my favourite script it makes Google much better.

There are many "cleaning" scripts that block ads and reorganise the page much better than AdBlock(i.e. DeviantART).
There are even some scripts that are like themes but I avoid them cause they can be really buggy.

I use many scripts that mostly make sites "darker" and I haven't experienced any significant problems.

blatantninja said:

When users start customizing how they view your site, it generally doesn't change much, but occasionally it can cause problems (especially if they heavily stylize it).

Click to expand...

Yes, it's definitely both a blessing and a curse. I'm not embarrassed to say that it happened to me too. I was using Adblock's companion Element Hiding Helper to remove some elements from a website. Much later I found out that I was actually hiding too much and was missing out on important content. You can never be too careful.

Google in dark looks great too. I'm only using one addon for Google at the moment, Google Preview (see attachment). Basically, it shows thumbnails for all search results, which makes it very easy to see where you want to go.