Wintage

Win95 Dark Golden Vintage theme for the whole web. A Tampermonkey userscript that restyles every site into a dark golden-brown Windows 95 application: pixel-sharp 3D bevels, zero rounded corners, zero animations, no hover flashbangs, Verdana everywhere.

The modern web optimizes for aesthetics at the expense of usability. Rounded corners replace visual hierarchy, animations replace feedback, shadows replace structure, and minimalism often removes the very cues our brains rely on to understand an interface.

Users shouldn't have to guess whether something is a button, a label, a card, or plain text. Wintage brings back explicit visual language: raised buttons, sunken inputs, sharp boundaries, consistent typography, zero distractions, and immediate state changes.

Every element communicates its purpose at a glance, reducing cognitive load and making the web feel like a precise instrument again instead of a collection of decorative bubbles.

Install

1. Install Tampermonkey (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Safari).
2. Click Install Wintage — Tampermonkey opens its install page automatically.
3. Done. Every site you visit is now running Windows 95, Dark Golden edition.

Updating

• Automatic: the script carries @updateURL/@downloadURL pointing at this repo, so Tampermonkey picks up new versions on its regular update checks.
• Manual refresh: Tampermonkey → Utilities → Check for userscript updates, or just click the install link again — it replaces the old version in place, no uninstall needed.

Features

• Dark golden palette — deep brown-black canvas #1A0F05, golden text #D4B87A, golden bevel highlights #C0A060. Solid flat surfaces only: no gradients, no blur, no transparency effects.
• Classic 3D bevels — buttons raised, inputs sunken, pressed buttons push in (with the authentic 1px label shift). Scrollbars are full 16px Win95-style, beveled thumb and buttons included.
• Radius killer — border-radius: 0 enforced everywhere, including framework CSS variables (Bootstrap, Material, YouTube, Reddit).
• Motion is forbidden — all transitions and animations are zeroed out. State changes are instant, like a real 1995 UI.
• Hover-highlighting disabled completely — no white flashbang rows, no gray tint blocks:
  • paint properties are surgically stripped from every readable :hover CSS rule (functional properties like display/visibility/opacity are kept, so hover-opened menus still work);
  • unreadable cross-origin stylesheets are neutralized by a transition-freeze fallback. Only real controls (buttons, links, inputs) keep an instant, themed bevel response.
• Verdana forced 100% everywhere — including inputs and textareas, with font smoothing disabled. Icon fonts are excluded so glyphs don't turn into letters. If you have a custom font installed under the name Verdana_m1 (e.g. a de-antialiased Verdana patch), it is used automatically; otherwise regular Verdana.
• Adaptive repainter — a lightweight JS sweeper converts light "flashbang" surfaces and unthemed dark-mode grays into the vintage brown scale, and fixes low-contrast (dark-on-dark) text to golden, at WCAG-aware thresholds. Images, videos, canvases, and players are never touched.
• Shadow DOM piercing — themes web components too (YouTube, Reddit, and friends) via an attachShadow hook.
• Popups behave — menus, dialogs, tooltips, and hovercards are recolored only; the script never forces opacity/z-index/visibility, so hidden site UI stays hidden.
• Safety guard — the script disables itself on OAuth, captcha, banking, and payment pages so critical flows are never restyled.

Palette

Token	Hex	Used for
Canvas	#1A0F05	outermost background
Soft	#1E1408	body / content backdrop
Surface	#2A1C0A	headers, nav, panels
Raised	#362812	buttons, popups, scrollbar thumb
Alt	#3A2A15	button hover
Bevel highlight	#C0A060	top-left 3D edges
Bevel shadow	#0E0803	bottom-right 3D edges
Text	#D4B87A	primary golden text
Muted	#7A6838	placeholders, disabled
Accent	#9DD9F9	links, focus

Bonus: matching browser theme

The browser-theme/ folder contains a Chromium theme (Cent Browser / Chrome / Edge / Brave) built from the same palette, so the browser chrome matches the pages. Install: chrome://extensions → enable Developer mode → Load unpacked → select the browser-theme folder.

Known behaviors

• Sites that build hover effects in JavaScript (class toggling) rather than CSS :hover may still show their own highlight.
• On rare sites whose CSS is cross-origin, clicking a non-focusable element can delay its visual state change until the mouse leaves it (the hover-freeze fallback at work). Real buttons and links are exempt.
• The script is static by design: no options panel, no per-site toggles. Fork it and edit the tokens at the top if you want a different flavor.

Releasing a new version (maintainers)

Edit wintage.user.js, then run:

.\release.ps1 -Message "what changed"

It bumps the @version patch number, commits, and pushes — Tampermonkey clients pick the update up automatically. Pass -Bump minor or -Bump major for bigger releases.

License

MIT