What Is Stylebot and What Does It Do?

Updated

Stylebot is a free, open-source browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge on desktop that lets you restyle any website. You point at an element on a page, change how it looks, and Stylebot writes the CSS and reloads your style every time you return to that site. It suits people who want to tweak a site's appearance without editing the site itself — from hiding a distracting sidebar to building a full dark reading theme.

How it works

The core loop is four steps, and the extension walks you through them:

  1. Open the editor. Click the Stylebot icon or press Alt+Shift+M.
  2. Pick an element. Click to select it; the fields show its current styles.
  3. Style it. Use the Basic controls (text, font, size, color, alignment, background, box, effects) or write CSS directly.
  4. Save a profile. You can keep different looks for the same site and switch between them in a click.

Because the changes are stored as CSS and reapplied on each visit, your restyle persists — you don't redo it every session. The editor also includes presets and a Hide/Reset control, so you can start from a ready-made look or strip an element out entirely.

What you can do with it

  • Restyle a reading page. The site's own example takes a news article and applies a dark background, warmer text, a larger serif body, and removes an ad — all from the same panel.
  • Keep multiple looks per site. Profiles let you save, say, a "clean reading" version and a "compact" version of the same site and flip between them.
  • Write CSS when the controls aren't enough. The Basic panel covers common properties; the Code option is there for anything else.
  • Drive it from a coding agent. Stylebot ships a CLI (npm install -g @stylebot/cli), so any agent that can run commands can restyle a site. In the documented example, an agent opens a page, outlines its elements, applies a saved CSS file, and takes a screenshot to check the result.

Is it right for you?

If you want to… Stylebot fits because…
Change how a site looks without changing the site Styles are stored locally and reapplied on each visit
Build a reusable reading or dark theme Profiles save and switch looks per site
Hand styling off to a script or agent A CLI exposes open, outline, CSS-set, and screenshot commands
Avoid paid tools It is described as free and open source

It is less suited if you need to change a site's behavior or content rather than its appearance, or if you need styling on mobile browsers — the extension runs on desktop Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

Getting started

Install it from the Chrome Web Store (also available for Firefox and Edge), open any page, and press Alt+Shift+M. Select one element, change a single property such as background color, and confirm the change persists after a reload. That one test tells you whether the extension's model — point, style, save, reload — matches how you want to work.