Stylus sees large user increase after Stylish removal

Martin Brinkmann
Jul 9, 2018
Internet
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12

The user styles manager Stylus has seen a large increase in downloads and daily users after Mozilla and Google removed the all-popular Stylish extension from their respective web stores for extensions.

Stylish was a popular browser extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (and compatible) web browsers that users could use to download, install, and run so-called userstyles.

A userstyle includes style information that overrides a websites' or service's default style. Examples are styles that turn a too-bright website into a darker one, remove elements from a page that users don't require or find annoying, and styles that add elements to websites to improve them.

Stylish collected and transmitted a user's entire browsing data to Stylish servers and linked the data to a unique identifier, and that is why it was removed.

Mozilla and Google removed Stylish from their web stores. The extension had millions of users across both stores, and the removal left a gap that needed to be filled by other extensions.

Our suggestion was Stylus, a browser extension that is very similar to Stylish in functionality as it is a fork of the extension. Basically, it is Stylish but without the analytics component that Stylish shipped with.

A quick look at Stylus' public data on Mozilla's Firefox Add-ons website suggests that the removal of Stylish has done wonders for the extension's downloads and daily user count.

stylus styles statistics

Stylus was downloaded an average of 200 times until July 2, 2018 when downloads skyrocketed to 6800 on July 4, 2018 and fell again to about 2000 on July 8, the last day stats were published on Mozilla Add-ons.

The average daily user count rose as well as a consequence from about 31000 average daily users prior to July 2018 to around 40000 now.

If you check the extensions total downloads over the past year, you will notice that more than 15% of all downloads happened in the past seven days.

Google does not give publishers options to reveal download and usage statistics publicly. Considering that Google Chrome is the more popular browser usage-wise, it is fair to assume that downloads and installs increased on a similar level.

The extension has 56,000 active users according to the Chrome Web Store. You see a lot of new comments that users gave the extension in the past week which suggests that the Chrome version has seen a push in user figures as well.

Closing Words

Stylish will probably be re-released once the owners deal with the issues that led to the removal of the extension from both web stores. It remains to be seen how users will react when it reemerges and whether Stylus will continue its rise or if it will abruptly stop when Stylish is released as a new version.

Now You: do you make use of userstyles?

Summary
Stylus sees large user increase after Stylish removal
Article Name
Stylus sees large user increase after Stylish removal
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The user styles manager Stylus has seen a large increase in downloads and daily users after Mozilla and Google removed Stylish.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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