Tag Archive for 'css'

Stylish: manage Firefox user styles to modify the appearance of website and browser UI elements

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:

  1. Impossible to execute malicious code in Stylish; in Greasemonkey, you could easily install a script that contains malicious code
  2. 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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CSS and JavaScript consolidation: fetching one big file is faster than ten small files

So you’ve enabled caching, gzipped your files, but your site still loads slowly? The culprit might be the large number of separate CSS and JavaScript files that the browser must load when first visiting your site.
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Minify and compress Javascript/CSS with minimal CPU overhead

With modern web designs, especially those with AJAXy features, you’d be shocked to find that Javascript and CSS contribute significantly to the amount of data your browser downloads for a webpage. Usually, the Javascript and CSS files are larger than the HTML webpage itself. Continuing my trend of debunking popular or common beliefs, read on for why on-the-fly JS/CSS compression that you read about on Digg often will actually crash your site hard when you get Dugg. I also present a simple yet more efficient way of compressing your files.
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