If you are a user of the Stylish extension, you will love this little tip.  I use iGoogle, however I never stay on the page long enough to use the embedded chat they included a while back.  However I am happy to say I found a solution. 

Install this Stylish user style:

• Hide iGoogle Chat Tab on iGoogle Home Page

Once doing so, the chat (as you seen in the screenshot above) disappears.  To make it work for me, I had to change:

http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en

to

http://www.google.com/ig

However, once that was done – it worked flawlessly.  An easy hack for a very lovable web page.  Got to love these Stylish user styles!

All Tabs are Rounded

Want to make all of your tabs more rounded inside of Firefox?  This user style will help you get that look and feel inside of Firefox.

Slightly Rounded Tabs

If you are not that crazy about the idea of having too many rounded edges, you could just round the upper-right of the tab, if needed.

I HATE Rounded Tabs

Now, if you have absolute distain for the idea of rounding off your tabs, I have a user style for you too.  With this one, you can make the tabs less rounded, and more square.

Only Round the Selected Tab

Last, but not least, you could also decide to round off only the selected tab.  The reason for doing this is to help visually make it different from the others so that you can pick it out from the crowd of tabs in your tab toolbar.

You now have more than a few ways to make your tabs stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Using what is called “user styles” the Stylish add-on for Firefox can empower your browsing experience by letting you personalize or fix the features of Firefox or the Web in general that bug you the most.

How do I get started with Stylish?

Once installed, all you have to do is right-click the status bar icon, select “Write Style” and then choose if you want to write a style for the URL you are on right now, or create an empty style not related to any web site, for now at least.  You can also tag your style, giving it a few descriptive words. 

Now how do you know what to put into the window, to customize Firefox (as I have done in the screenshot above) or your favorite web site?  I suggest checking out userstyles.org. 

Where can I find and learn to create user styles?

Not only is userstyles.org a great repository of scripts others have written that you can use, it is also a place where you can view the code they used, so you can try it out when you create your own user style.

Here are a few resources to get you started finding the user style that you need or want to use:

• Highest Rated User Styles
• Popular User Styles
• Newest User Styles
• Recently Updated User Styles

There is also a user styles blog and set of forums for you to follow too.  If I had a top 10 list of my favorite Firefox add-ons, Stylish would be in the top 5, at least.  Anything that helps the users of Firefox customize the Web or Firefox to meet their needs better is a winner in my book.

See on the top and bottom?  It has never looked right to me.  So I did a little playing around with the Stylish extension for Firefox, and turned it into this:

Now I am far from being a Jedi master of Stylish, and writing user styles.  I am just learning the basics.  Since this was a big annoyance to me though, I thought it might help somebody else out there.

Download Stylish, and then go down to the task bar icon for it, right-click and select “Write Style” and then “Blank Style”.  Type in any description you wish (mine is “Round Address and Search Boxes”) then type this into the text box for your user style:

#urlbar {
-moz-appearance: none !important;
-moz-border-radius: 3px !important;
padding-right: 1px !important; }

#searchbar .searchbar-textbox {
-moz-appearance: none !important;
-moz-border-radius: 3px !important; }

Hit preview to test it out, and if it worked – then hit the save button.  This worked for me using Firefox 3/Vista Ultimate, so hopefully it will work for you.  If anybody has any pointers, be sure to share!

Anybody else run into this issue yet? Seems like with the last round of Google Reader updates they broke the widescreen view in Firefox.

After searching the Web for a solution or for others in the same boat at me – I couldn’t find much help. So what is a guy to do? Well I happen to be an avid fan of the Stylish extension so I thought I would write up a little fix using it to solve the problem.

+ Get Fix Google Widescreen View at UserStyles.org

Pick up my user style and see if it does the job for you. The only drawback is that this will get rid of the new toggle button for getting rid of the Google sidebar menu. Personally I have always just used the “U” key to get this job done. Hope this helps others out there being bugged by the same pesky issue.

Darkoogle – Gives you that “hey, somebody just turned the lights out” feeling for the Google Web pages out there. Personally I like the white look a little more, but this is neat for trying something “a little different”.

Transparency Edits for iGoogle – Want to make a few elements on iGoogle a little more transparent? This user style makes your search at the top fade a little more into the background so it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Google Reader Optimized – This one takes away all of the useless things from around Google Reader (mainly from the top) and gives you a cleaner and more straight forward interface to work with.

Gmail Air Skin – Want to give Gmail a more curved interface? This style makes a lot of your menu items and the Gmail interface a little more “round” I guess you could say.

Have any other popular ones you love but I missed?