Give your Favorite Web Applications a Face-Lift

Sites like Gmail, Google Reader and del.icio.us are essential, functional and extensible. We live in them. But aesthetically, they don’t win raves out of the box. Thank goodness a web application’s look & feel is only skin deep. With a few add-ons and tweaks, it’s easy to completely change the browsing experience for popular, yet not-so-easy-on-the-eye sites.

You use Firefox, Safari or Camino as your default browser, right? Of course you do. So read on.

Gmail

From this:

to this:

How? Start with Greasemonkey, the fantastic add-on that lets you inject JavaScript code to manipulate the functionality of a site. Then add Lifehacker’s Better Gmail (current version 0.5). It’s a single add-on that gives you all sorts of options for fixing and tweaking Gmail, including changing the look & feel. Turn features on and off in a one-stop-shopping menu. No touching messy code required.

Google Reader

From this:

to this:

How? Start with Stylish, a Firefox add-on which lets you change the style sheet for any site. Greasemonkey manipulates the functionality of the site through JavaScript. Stylish is purely for appearances. Then add Jon Hicks’ beautifully designed Google Reader style sheet. Hicks gave similar TLC to Bloglines a while back. His style sheets also work in Camino and Safari (see his post for instructions).

Del.icio.us

From this:

to this:

How? Start here to download what you need to change the del.icio.us style sheet. Add site thumbnails to your own del.icio.us bookmarks page with the BetterSearch add-on. In addition to del.icio.us, the thumbnails also work in other search engines, including Google.

Don’t like these looks? Browse for other styles or scripts and let us know your favorites.

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