What Firefox plug-in is best suited for making most sites permanently white-or-grey text on a dark (if not black) background?

September 10, 2010 9:29 AM

What Firefox plug-in is best suited for making most sites permanently white-or-grey text on a dark (if not black) background?

I'm looking to browse the net with Firefox (Windows XP, Windows 7) and have a darkweb experience. Light to medium text on dark to black backgrounds, wherever possible, with a quick way to toggle back if that ruins some highly particular CSS. Obviously, Flash and Silverlight on pages will not change.

I am looking to avoid having to tweak the stylesheet of every single site I'd visit. I see a default stylesheet and I want it painted black. It's like, how much more black could this site be? and the answer is none. None more black. It's darkweb time, etc.

I'm clearly missing the phrase for this sort of effect. "Light on black" doesn't seem to be it, though.

posted by adipocere to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Readability is a bookmarklet but does have an inverse mode. Light on dark would be great for me too.
posted by stuartmm at 10:10 AM on September 10, 2010

There's tons of bookmarklets for this: Readability (with inverse option), Readable, Darken. The last one also has a Greasemonkey version which I guess would make it permanent. I'm sure if you look on userstyles.org there are plenty of Stylish CSS snippets, but I don't know if they're general or site-specific. Oh, and I see Readability comes in a Firefox extension version too.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:11 AM on September 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

Perhaps one of these bookmarklets will do what you want? Not sure about the quick change back, though.
posted by backwards guitar at 10:14 AM on September 10, 2010

Just add what you want to userContent.css, and mark it !important.

(I've used this to control my chrome, specifically to reduce the size of the status bar, on my netbook.)

Alternately, under Menu|Tools|Option (In linux, Menu|Edit|Preferences) | Content | Colors, uncheck "Allow pages to set their own colors...", and set the color scheme you want.

(I just did this to check it, and I'm typing in black (only links are colored, and you can set that color too) on a white screen. You can of course set the text and background to what you prefer.)
posted by orthogonality at 10:16 AM on September 10, 2010

zap colors bookmarklet, which I altered somehow (probably by removing a confirmation window; that's typical for me). Put the following text into a bookmark:

javascript:(function(){var%20url=window.location.href;%20if(url.indexOf(%22mail.google.com%22)<1){var%20newSS,%20styles='*%20{%20background:%20white%20!%20important;%20color:%20black%20!important%20}%20:link,%20:link%20*%20{%20color:%20#0000EE%20!important%20}%20:visited,%20:visited%20*%20{%20color:%20#551A8B%20!important%20}';if(document.createStyleSheet){document.createStyleSheet(%22javascript:'%22+styles+%22'%22);%20}%20else%20{%20newSS=document.createElement('link');%20newSS.rel='stylesheet';%20newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles);%20document.getElementsByTagName(%22head%22)[0].appendChild(newSS);}}})();
posted by IAmBroom at 10:16 PM on September 11, 2010