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In a report earlier this week, Mozilla software engineer Andreas Wagner stated that the company decided to remove and block the Stylish extension due to violations of data privacy terms in the evaluation policy.
Chrome and Firefox remove Stylish extension
Mozilla removes Stylish add-on page on Firefox
Google quietly removes Stylish extension without providing any explanation. Now, when accessing the Stylish extension page on the Chrome web store, users will be greeted with a 404 error message.
Stylish accesses web browsing history and sends data to remote servers
The sequential removal of the Stylish extension by major browser giants is due to a report by software developer Robert Heaton, published on Monday, accusing Stylish of accessing web browsing history and sending data to remote servers.
In his report, Heaton emphasizes the increasing difficulty in controlling Stylish after the browser extension was sold to another developer in August 2016, and subsequently acquired by the renowned analytics company SimilarWeb.
At the time the extension was acquired by SimilarWeb in January 2017, there were numerous reports regarding privacy concerns within the Stylish community. SimilarWeb stated they would gather and analyze data to determine user numbers.
Screenshots captured using Heaton's Network Sniffing Tool reveal that the Stylish extension collects users' web browsing history and sends this data to SimilarWeb's servers.
Users may opt for alternative browser extensions instead
The Stylish browser extension enables users to customize the appearance of any website according to their preferences. However, following Heaton's report, major players like Mozilla and Google also removed the extension from their online stores.
After SimilarWeb's acquisition of Stylish was announced in January 2017, the open-source community developed a new project called Stylus, based on the old Stylish project, operating similarly to the old extension but without data collection code.
Stylus is currently available for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera browsers. To download and install Stylus, visit the following links:
=> Download Stylus for Chrome
=> Download Stylus for Firefox
=> Download Stylus for Opera
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