Introduction
This information is everywhere but still wanderers-in/late-to-the-partyers sign up at codeproject to ask the same question. As if it were a programming question. So, yeah, I guess the steps to actuating their intuition really IS programming.
Background
It's always been possible to customize the internet browser's look. And it's never been easier now that browsers are competing for sentience.
Steps to Customize Browser look
01. In IE8 -> main menu
02. Tools/Internet Options/General tab
03. Accessibility (lowest layer) -> clickety
04. Farthest right button -> Formatting -> tick all (3x)
05. Farthest Left button -> Colors -> set "Text" to (somelight color) & "Background" to (somedark color)
06. (while you're at it here, also get rid of the garrish "number 3 blue hyperlink" by assigning "Visited" and "Unvisited" to (someother color))
07. In IE8 -> added tweak ... disable ClearType (just b'cuz ... see beneath here for reason)
08. Tools/Internet Options/Advanced tab
09. Settings (scroll down some) ... under Multimedia -> untick "Always use ClearType for HTML"
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01. In ff -> main menu
02. Tools/Options/Content/Fonts&Colors/Advanced -> clickety
03. Fonts -> untick "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above" (precautionary)
04. (back) Colors -> set "Text" to (somelight color) & "Background" to (somedark color)
05. Untick "Use system colors" and pick "Always" from "Override the colors specified by the page with my selections above" dropdown.
06. In ff -> added tweak ... disable ClearType ('cause yer gonna want to now that yer in reverso color domain)
07. Type in "about:config" into URL box
08. In "Search" type in "cleartype"
09. At "gfx.font_rendering.cleartype.use_for_downloadable_fonts" make "Status" turn to "user set" by changing "Value" from "true" to "false" by typing in "false"
Points of Interest
IE8 is outdated and in the past couple of years of use it's begun to throw up startup link pages to an ms upgrade site so it's getting even more challenged to display the above UI, much less put content into it, so ... And FF is delving on into the icepack with this great idea of making everything FF a user customizable parameter in "about:config". This has got to be the shape of things to come. Even better would be a regression to that old window's help idea of being able to depress a keyboard key and mouse over something/anything that didn't display right, where a context click would activate a "cart" of faiture altérable. But I digress ...
History
Version one.
