Stylish improves web experience

I hate advertisement. I would never ever dream about putting advertisement on this blog. I hate it with all my soul, so much that I pay extra for some services just to get rid of the advertisement. I don't look at commercial TV and I get bored at podradios pausing for a message from sponsors. Ye, I guess that you need sponsors because it is expensive to host a podcast, but I would rather pay 3$ per show just to not listen to your intro, outro or sponsor messages. Pure content - that's the melody!

Banner advertisment

The Internet is full of these banners that tries to steal focus from the content. I've been a fan of Adblock for years, and I also use Flashblock on all my computers. Adblock uses some specialized logic that block ads from known advertisement sources. Flashblock blocks all flash running in the browser. In Flashblock you have a white list of sites that you want to support flash on, for example TED or InfoQ. All other flash will display a play icon instead, where you can select to make an exception for this site.

This is great if you're a tab-user like me that easily open up 30-40 tabs every day in my browser. If each would have a flash that would steal CPU, my computer would be doomed.

Style the web with stylish

To take this a step further, there really are some sites that look horrible, because they manage to get advertisement beyond both Adblock and flashblock. What can we do about them? Stylish is a Chrome plugin that lets you redecorate a plugin by rewriting the css. This gives you full control over the presentation layer on the web.

The cool thing is the gallery where you can download predefined styles created by the community. This way you don't have to restyle the whole web by yourself. :) Here's what a swedish newspaper looks without stylish.

And this is what it looks like after custom styling.

It's like you're able to breathe again! Now, go get stylish from the Google Web Store.