Change Colors Lets You Replace A Page's Style In Chrome

You may stumble upon useful pages sometimes that have such an irritating design or page style that you have a hard time concentrating on the content that it offers.

Maybe it is the blue text on the dark background, or lots of whitespace that hurts the eyes, or links that you cannot distinguish from text. You can run into many different usability issues on the Internet in regards web page accessibility.

Update: Change Color is no longer available on the Store. You can try the Chrome extension Midnight Lizard instead which offers similar capabilities.

Change Color

The Google Chrome extension Change Color offers a solution. Unlike bookmarklets that only work on the active page, it can override styles permanently.

When you install the extension for the first time, you will notice a new icon in the Chrome address bar which indicates that the extension is ready for use.

A click on that icon displays three options: you can either apply the page style override to the active page, the domain or all websites that you visit.

Page and domain can be interesting, considering that you may encounter different page layouts on the same domain, which is for instance the case for the Ghacks homepage and the forum.

An option to change the page style for a subdomain or a specific directory is missing and would certainly be useful.

The default colors may not be to everyone's liking. The background is changed to black, the text color to white, the links to blue and the visited links to violet.

You can change all colors, and a handful of additional options in the extension's preferences.

You can change background, text, link and visited link colors with a click on the color in the preferences, or by entering a color value directly into one of the forms. What's missing is an option to only override one of the colors and keep the remaining colors by default.

The extension does not change the font used to display the textual contents on the page or website by default. This can be changed in the preferences as well. You can select any available system font instead which is then used to display the text on the web page.

It is furthermore possible to change the font size, disable images and Flash objects via the preferences.

The changes are visible immediately and I suggest you open two Chrome windows next to each other to work on the replacement style while you have the preferences menu open to make adjustments. That's easier than having to switch tabs to see how the changes look on websites.

Change Color comes with keyboard shortcuts that enable or disable the page style override. Ctrl-Shift-p, Ctrl-Shift-d and Ctrl-Shift-g enable or disable the override on the current page, domain or globally.

The extension is available for download on the Chrome Web Store.

Tip: You can use the Override function of Chrome's Dev Tools to make permanent changes to websites as well.

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