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
    Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis

    Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...

  • By
    Create a Quick MooTools Slideshow with Preloading Images

    I've been creating a lot of slideshow posts lately. Why, you ask? Because they help me get chicks. A quick formula for you: The following code snippet will show you how to create a simple slideshow with MooTools; the script will also...

Discussion

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