Stylebot goes Social: Change the look of popular websites with a click

Stylebot is an excellent Chrome extension that lets you modify any web page – and now it’s gone social with a fantastic gallery of web page customisations, tweaks and overhauls that any Chrome user can install.

In case you’re not familiar with it, Stylebot launched last September, allowing you to change the fonts, colours, spacing and other design elements of any website, saving your design so that every time you visit that site, it looks just the way you like.

Once installed, it’s just a case of visiting the website you want to edit, clicking the “CSS” icon in the address bar and getting to work. Once Stylebot is active, moving your mouse pointer around the screen highlights different elements of the page. Just click, say, a headline or a an image and you van get to work.

If you’re a beginner, a number of page elements have easy editing tools. Changing colours, fonts, text size, visibility and spacing is quick and easy. Advanced users with an in-depth knowledge of CSS have free reign on editing any page element they choose.

The <3 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Now Stylebot Social has been launched by the extension’s author, Ankit Ahuja. This fledgling site acts a gallery for some of the best designs created by Stylebot users, and you can install them with a click.

Some designs are total overhauls. For example. the Superdry Google design gives Google search results a sleek, modernist look, while Cleaner, Simpler Digg does offers exactly what you’d expect. As you might expect, there are plenty of ad-blocker scripts that retain the look of the pages while striping out advertising units too.

Of course, this is nothing that can’t be done with the many Greasemonkey scripts out there, but Stylebot is so easy to use, and the website makes browsing redesigns so easy, that if this takes off we can see it become a go-to place for Chrome users wanting a change from default designs of popular sites.