Stylish

If you've ever wanted to customize the look of your browser, the extension known as Stylish has a solution for you. While this popular extension for Firefox and Chrome offers users with a bounty of tools they can use to create a personalized web browsing experience, it comes with some steep disadvantages. Most prominent among these problems is the fact that Stylish tracks all of your user activity logged by your browser. For those worried about internet security measures, this can be a huge issue, and it's caused both Firefox and Chrome to pull Stylish from their storefronts. While that buffet of collection services may make the privacy conscious individual rightly concerned, it also leaves a much bigger footprint of information that could be exploited by cyber-criminals. But if you're curious about the sorts of features you'll find in Stylish and unconcerned about your private information being collected and potentially shared, this neat little extension is well worth a peek.

While it may have taken until 2017 for the controversy about Stylish to hit, the extension actually started development a decade prior to that, and that's given the developer a lot of time to pack this piece of software full of features. Put aside the risks involved with this extension and what you'll find is actually both impressive and versatile. What's really cool is that you aren't relegated to just customizing sites according to templates. Instead, you can create custom profiles for your most visited sites. Whether you're looking to strip down the information that appears in your Facebook feed or create a custom color style for your favorite news sites, the options are all here and easy to access. A number of templates make it easy to plug and play with your new themes, but getting your hands dirty and creating a new style from scratch isn't intimidating at all. Through a simple interface, you can create a website design that matches your needs explicitly. If you've created a style that you really like, you can even share it online. While this bustling online marketplace for styles has become significantly more muted since the discovery of spyware within the program, the long legacy of Stylish ensures that you'll still find plenty of options if you just aren't feeling like creating your own. Just keep in mind that creating more complex themes does require some experience in coding. Luckily, most of the scripts are pretty basic, and the inclusion of a color coding system makes it a great way for amateurs to learn the ins and outs of basic programming. It's just a shame that everything here is so impressive, because the inclusion of spyware will constitute a hard no for a lot of users; and despite an update launching in the weeks after the extension's ban, there's been no discreet sign that the company is changing their policy on information gathering.