I understand how that could be frustrating, but as a user I find styled form elements pretty annoying.
I would love to have control for myself (i.e. be able to customize Chromium's built-in date picker that gets used everywhere), and limit (or prevent) sites from customizing it themselves. I feel like I have a better understanding of what's usable for myself than an arbitrary web dev.
But I also feel it's wishful thinking. Maybe Opera would have done something like that back in the day when they made their own browser, but I'm not hopeful it'll get into Chrome or Firefox any time soon.
Some people are saying “user styles let you do this”, but it’s not actually true: take a textarea, for example; if you set its background-color, the browser discards its regular textarea appearance (which might have a special border colour and style and radius) and leaves you with what’s actually specified. Expressed very approximately, adjusting various properties implies `appearance: none`.
And you can’t get it back. `background-color: initial`? Nope, no native appearance. `appearance: textarea !important`? No go. `background-color: f(env(x))` (a stupid way of getting a runtime-invalid value due to a bad spec, see https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3792 for details)? Nada.
You could provide your own styles for form elements, but you can’t use user styles to retain native form element styling.
Same with fonts, and colors, and text size, and scroll behavior, and on and on. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, web sites published hyperTEXT and the user agent (browser) operating on behalf of the user, rendered the page according to the user's preferences. I remember how cool it was to configure it so every web site rendered in white text over a brick wall background! Slowly browsers added HTML tag after tag and CSS to give more and more layout and visual control over to the web site publisher and less to the user. Today, stylistic user preferences are a relic of the past, as browsers have given everything away to the publisher.
I agree it's wishful thinking. Sadly, web publishers have gotten used to all this control and expect the browser to be some kind of pixel-perfect renderer like Photoshop, and there's no push from end users to have this kind of user configurability anymore.
> your user styles can override the developer's (and the browser's) styles on a per-site basis.
Too bad Mac Safari is the only browser of significance that still has an interface to load a user style sheet.
Yes, other browsers have extensions for using them including separate ones for separate sites but how many people really want to create and manage those, especially on mobile?
I would love to have control for myself (i.e. be able to customize Chromium's built-in date picker that gets used everywhere), and limit (or prevent) sites from customizing it themselves. I feel like I have a better understanding of what's usable for myself than an arbitrary web dev.
But I also feel it's wishful thinking. Maybe Opera would have done something like that back in the day when they made their own browser, but I'm not hopeful it'll get into Chrome or Firefox any time soon.