Stylus sees large user increase after Stylish removal

The user styles manager Stylus has seen a large increase in downloads and daily users after Mozilla and Google removed the all-popular Stylish extension from their respective web stores for extensions.

Stylish was a popular browser extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (and compatible) web browsers that users could use to download, install, and run so-called userstyles.

A userstyle includes style information that overrides a websites' or service's default style. Examples are styles that turn a too-bright website into a darker one, remove elements from a page that users don't require or find annoying, and styles that add elements to websites to improve them.

Stylish collected and transmitted a user's entire browsing data to Stylish servers and linked the data to a unique identifier, and that is why it was removed.

Mozilla and Google removed Stylish from their web stores. The extension had millions of users across both stores, and the removal left a gap that needed to be filled by other extensions.

Our suggestion was Stylus, a browser extension that is very similar to Stylish in functionality as it is a fork of the extension. Basically, it is Stylish but without the analytics component that Stylish shipped with.

A quick look at Stylus' public data on Mozilla's Firefox Add-ons website suggests that the removal of Stylish has done wonders for the extension's downloads and daily user count.

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Stylus was downloaded an average of 200 times until July 2, 2018 when downloads skyrocketed to 6800 on July 4, 2018 and fell again to about 2000 on July 8, the last day stats were published on Mozilla Add-ons.

The average daily user count rose as well as a consequence from about 31000 average daily users prior to July 2018 to around 40000 now.

If you check the extensions total downloads over the past year, you will notice that more than 15% of all downloads happened in the past seven days.

Google does not give publishers options to reveal download and usage statistics publicly. Considering that Google Chrome is the more popular browser usage-wise, it is fair to assume that downloads and installs increased on a similar level.

The extension has 56,000 active users according to the Chrome Web Store. You see a lot of new comments that users gave the extension in the past week which suggests that the Chrome version has seen a push in user figures as well.

Closing Words

Stylish will probably be re-released once the owners deal with the issues that led to the removal of the extension from both web stores. It remains to be seen how users will react when it reemerges and whether Stylus will continue its rise or if it will abruptly stop when Stylish is released as a new version.