Bytes is one of my favourite dev newsletters — funny, sharp, and it lands in my inbox twice a week. But like every good free thing, it pays the bills with ads. The "Cool Bits" list quietly mixes [sponsored] links in with the real ones, and every issue opens the "Our Friends (With Benefits)" sponsor block before you get to the actual content.

None of this is a big deal. But I read it enough that the little papercuts add up, so I wrote a small userscript to give myself a slightly more "premium" reading experience — right inside Gmail, no account, no paywall.

What it does

The script only ever touches emails from tyler@ui.dev. Everything else in your inbox is left completely alone. When it sees a Bytes issue, it does two things:

1. Blurs the sponsored items. Any Cool Bit tagged [sponsored] gets a light, still-readable blur so paid placements stop blending in with the editorial links. Hover over one to reveal it fully — nothing is hidden or removed, just visually turned down.

2. Moves the sponsor section to the bottom. The "Our Friends (With Benefits)" block gets relocated to the end of the email, right before the "Want us to say nice things about your company?" box — so the content you actually opened the email for comes first.

That's it. Small, boring, and exactly the kind of thing a userscript is perfect for.

Requirements

You need a userscript manager — a browser extension that runs little scripts on the pages you tell it to. I use Tampermonkey, which is free and works on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.

If you've never used one before: think of it as a place to install tiny browser tweaks. Install the extension once, and it handles everything after that.

Install

  1. Install Tampermonkey for your browser.
  2. Open the script on GreasyFork: Gmail: Bytes newsletter tweaks
  3. Click Install — Tampermonkey will pop up asking you to confirm. Confirm it.
  4. Open any Bytes issue in Gmail. The tweaks apply automatically.

That's the whole setup. Open a future issue and it just works.

A few small details

  • Web Gmail only. It runs on mail.google.com, not the mobile apps.
  • Nothing leaves your browser. No tracking, no accounts, no data sent anywhere — it's all local.
  • It's tuned, not hardcoded. If you crack open the script, there are a couple of knobs at the top: BLUR_PX controls how strong the blur is, and there's a safety cap so it can never blur more than a fraction of an email by accident.
  • It leans on the newsletter's layout. The script finds sections by their headings ("Our Friends", "Want us to say nice things") rather than Gmail's mangled class names. If Bytes ever redesigns its template, the reorder is the part most likely to need a small tweak.

Free to use under the MIT license. If you read Bytes in Gmail too, hopefully it makes your Tuesdays and Fridays a little nicer.

Related: a Bytes-themed VS Code theme

If you like Bytes' visual style, I also made Bytes Newsletter Theme, a VS Code color theme inspired by it.