Over the years I've seen efforts by the open web community to coalesce over the standards we wanted browser vendors to provide us. The events page on webwewant.fyi gives you an idea of the momentum our efforts have…

Though I appreciate standards and great features are a good thing to make a noise about, over the years I've come to realise the web we want is slightly different to the web I want.

So, what do I want from the web? And I'll be upfront right here, it's not the web, it's my access to the web that I want to influence.

MY EBOOK£5 for Working the Command Line

Gain command-line shortcuts and processing techniques, install new tools and diagnose problems, and fully customize your terminal for a better, more powerful workflow.

TL;DR

Given that I own the device I'm visiting web sites, I want to be able to full modify everything about the web site I'm viewing. For my own customisation. The same way that I cover my bicycle with stickers, add Spokey Dokies or change the brakes and add a horn.

To have full control requires three things:

  1. Control over the style via CSS.
  2. The ability to modify interactivity via JavaScript. Though this is a little more complicated (see later on in my post), and potentially not as important.
  3. Be able to modify network requests, either to prevent content/ads loading or to modify the data, such as stripping podcasts and audio books from the web interface of a music player like Spotify.

This should work both on desktop (which is significantly easier) and mobile, regardless of the platform. A bonus would be to have this same control over "native" apps installed.

I've got a few working solutions, but not to everything, and I'd love to read your ideas and suggestions.

Hiding content and modifying styles

The user origin stylesheets - the reason we have !important, defines that a browser vendor will first apply their system styles ("User-Agent Origin "), then user-origin styles - i.e. ones we, the individuals can write, then apply the web site hosted styles ("Author Origin") - i.e. the stylesheets in the markup.

Except that zero browsers support this feature any more. However there's a number of browser extensions that brings this back. Today I use Stylus which does also have a nice sync feature.

I have this (constantly) work-in-progress stylesheet that removes distractions from web sites (userstyles.world / gist) - I use it so that I can nuke annoying popups, so it's always growing with new selectors.

Although Firefox is my daily desktop driver, for some reason I use Brave on my phone. Brave, along with Chrome (and I'd guess other Blink based browsers) doesn't support extensions (and they don't support user origin styles)