Override Vista and XP’s Themed Buttons and Scrollbars Using a META Tag

By  on  

The first thing I do to any fresh Windows XP or Vista install is change the theme to old-school "Windows Classic" theme. Square gray boxes, in my opinion, are much better than the awful "rounded", colored bars. The XP and Vista theme settings also bleed into Internet Explorer, shaping and color buttons in ways I don't want.

Luckily, using an HTML META tag, I can tell the browser to ignore the theme's settings and show the standard, gray button.

<meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" content="No"/>

I'm not advocating this, simply showing how it can be done.

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Disable Autocomplete, Autocapitalize, and Autocorrect

    Mobile and desktop browser vendors do their best to help us not look like idiots by providing us autocomplete, autocorrect, and autocapitalize features.  Unfortunately these features can sometimes get in the way;  we don't always want or need the help they provide.  Luckily most browsers allow...

  • By
    Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads

    Honesty hour confession:  file uploading within the web browser sucks.  It just does.  Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms.  Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!