Another reason to love Firefox.

OK, you know how it goes -- you see a rec for a story that sounds cool, you hit the link, the page loads -- and you stagger back from the monitor, blinded by some hellish combo of acid-green-on-black type, or lurid pink on purple. Or you struggle through a paragraph or so of dim grey print on darker grey, before giving up the whole thing, rubbing your eyes and muttering anathema. Perhaps you are so annoyed you post a nasty rant to your LJ about the godawaful design taste of some people.

Well, cringe no more, nor mutter and rant. All you need to do is:

1. Use Firefox. (Don't have it? Just go here and get it. Go on, I'll wait, it's a quick download, and you'll thank me later.)

2. Then go here and download the Web Developer extension. Once it's downloaded, all you have to do to make it active is to quit the browser and relaunch.

3. Now, when you hit one of those blindingly illegible pages, just right-click anywhere in the page, and from the context menu thus summoned, choose Web Developer --> Disable -- Disable Page Colors. And -- voila, like magic, the page will reload as plain black-on-white text. (To return to the original state, just go through the steps again and deselect Disable Page Colors.) (Only make sure you don't change from one to the other while you're in the middle of composing an LJ entry or your text will be lost [Voice of Experience].)

There are a jillion other very cool things you can do with Web Developer (view and edit CSS, use your own stylesheet for pages, get rid of images, etc. etc.)--but this one function alone has already saved me a world of aggravation. And it's only one aspect of one of a jillion other cool extensions (Image Zoom, Nuke Anything, Mouse Gestures [without which I can no longer function]). I snuggle Firefox to my bosom, and cover it with smooches.