Update: Paul Irish and the Chrome Dev Tools team have informed of us some changes. Check out my original blog post for more information on the changes and how you can re-add custom devtools theme support.

@darcy Might want to put the brakes on your theme RT @simonowendesign "Remove the concept of user stylesheets" https://t.co/DWIE7yxWNj

— Maurice Cruz (@autoMOton) November 12, 2013

Recently, it was brought to my attention that the latest version of Chrome (Canary v. 33.0.1708.0) has removed support for User Stylesheets. When I wrote about this feature, nearly 3 years ago, it was something that developers seemed to love and find use in. Not just for modifying styles on particular websites, but for modifying their development environment (ie. "Skinning" their dev tools).

Last year Addy Osmani wrote a great Google+ follow up to that original blog post that included a number of great community created developer tools themes. Dedicated websites were even created to showcase themes, most notably devthemez.com. As self-proclaimed hackers, I think we enjoy modifying our working environments to feel customized to our personalities/preferences.

To add insult to injury, I personally believe the Chrome Developer Tools are in desperate need of a design and UX overhaul. Firefox has focused on shipping great design as well as new innovative development tools. If the Chrome team doesn't start to emphasize UI/UX we'll begin to, if not already, see a shift back towards Firefox as the developer's go-to browser for development.

One of the few ways we, as a community, can help to push that focus is to show the Chrome team how things "could" be. That, of course, requires tools or APIs to be available to us to modify the dev tools themselves. User Stylesheets was one of the ways we could accomplish that.

If you agree, show support by heading over to the Chromium Bug Tracker and starring/commenting on the issue I've created there to re-implement User Stylesheets: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=318566…..