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

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing LazyLoad 2.0

    While improvements in browsers means more cool APIs for us to play with, it also means we need to maintain existing code.  With Firefox 4's release came news that my MooTools LazyLoad plugin was not intercepting image loading -- the images were loading regardless of...

  • By
    Modal-Style Text Selection with Fokus

    Every once in a while I find a tiny JavaScript library that does something very specific, very well.  My latest find, Fokus, is a utility that listens for text selection within the page, and when such an event occurs, shows a beautiful modal dialog in...

Discussion

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