I can’t believe I’ve never stumbled across Stylish until recently. It is similar to Greasemonkey, which seems to snatch all the media attention. See this page for the differences between the two. The two features that interest me the most about Stylish:
- Impossible to execute malicious code in Stylish; in Greasemonkey, you could easily install a script that contains malicious code
- Simple updating of installed styles in Stylish; in Greasemonkey, you generally have to go back to the download page of each of your scripts and manually check for updates *yawn*
Also, the official repository of user styles for Stylish, userstyles.org, is a bit better designed that that of Greasemonkey’s, userscripts.org. userstyles.org has “most popular” and “highest rated” pages, and shows popular styles in bold. Unfortunately, both sites leave a lot to be desired. It is a major pain having to scan through tens and hundreds of unverified submissions with wildly differing code quality, tagging, presentation, etc. More advanced searching and sorting methods accompanied with stricter submission requirements (perhaps a moderated section and a free-for-all section) and better presentation would be wonderful.
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My day-to-day web browser is not the officially branded and built Mozilla Firefox, but a third-party build by Tete that contains general optimizations and specific optimizations for my CPU. Tete’s build boasts improved page rendering speed and faster browser startup. YMMV, of course. These optimizations might be experimental, or situational, or have benefits and drawbacks that are not worth the official development team’s trouble to sort out.
Of all the third-party Firefox builds available out there, one would be hard pressed to find any build that’s updated as quickly as Tete’s, keeping up with Mozilla’s latest security updates. Third-party builds don’t enjoy the convenience of Mozilla’s auto-update feature, obviously. Often-times you have to wait weeks for a third-party builder to update his build, if he hasn’t abandoned his efforts. With Tete, a new build is up whenever I learn of a new Firefox release and visit his site. Furthermore, Tete’s been maintaining his build for over two years, since the days of Firefox 1.x. Many many other third-party builders have come and gone.
I highly recommend Tete’s third-party optimized build of Firefox for those of you who want to squeeze a little extra performance out of their beloved browser. Not recommended for people who are uncomfortable messing with their computers and need their software to just work.
Instructions:
- Install the appropriate version, probably the Visual C++ 2005 SP1 (PGO) SSE version on most modern computers.
- Choose the appropriate version of the custom tmemutil.dll depending on your CPU and replace the existing DLL in the folder. I’m actually using the listed beta DLL without any issues.
- Download and run the module binder in Tete’s Firefox folder for faster Firefox startups.
