1181972 - [Linux] in-content pages (preferences, about:config, network error pages, ...) have hardcoded off-white backgrounds instead of honoring system colors

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Theme, defect)

Description

[M M]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150511103818

Steps to reproduce:

Opened the new preference tab.


Actual results:

There is a hardcoded white background with blackish text, and grey sidebar.  

This clashes with my OS theme.  I set my OS theme, because I want all apps to use it, not have each one decide on its own.

I just noticed that about:config has also be recently styled too, dev tools have been for a while.  About:memory, about:addons, and newtab however continue to honor the system theme.

Even if one loves the pref colors chosen for us, it should be easy to see this is inconsistent.  Please honor the system theme, like a good citizen in the app ecosystem.


Expected results:

The preferences tab should honor the system theme, just like the older dialog did .... from recent Firefoxes back to the first release of Mosaic.

Comment 1

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Thanks for flagging me on this bug. Is there a particular question that you have of me though?

Comment 2

[M M]

Didn't flag anyone manually, guess that you might have been flagged automatically when I chose the category and created the ticket.

Comment 3

[M M]

Oops, sorry, looks like Loic did.

Comment 4

[jd01752]

Attachment: Example of Preference page when choosing white text and dark background as the overriding colors.

I started getting this visibility problem only after version 41 (linux and win).
Any sub-dialogs within preferences do obey the color choices however.

Comment 5

[Loic]

It's fixed in FF44.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Loic from comment #5)
> It's fixed in FF44.
> 
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1207084 ***

This isn't a dupe of that bug.

Comment 8

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Philipp, can you advise as to what you think we should do here? I would tend to agree with the reporter that the use of fixed colours is not ideal.

Comment 9

[M M]

Attachment: firefox44.png

Latest screen-shot attached.

Comment 10

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

Is this linux only? If so, how are we dealing with it on other platforms?

Seems like the main problem is that we are combining dynamic font colors with a fixed background color.
It would make sense to have either both static or both fixed, so that we don't run into these situations of light text on a light background.

Comment 11

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Out of office until Feb. 22! Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo from comment #10)
> Is this linux only? If so, how are we dealing with it on other platforms?

We've never done anything for dark themes on OS X, and on Windows there are no such builtin themes except the high contrast theme, which overrides our colours in that case.

> Seems like the main problem is that we are combining dynamic font colors
> with a fixed background color.

Well, no, we fix both. But we don't 'fix' the background colour "hard enough" for linux checkbox hover styles as seen in the Firefox 44 screenshot. I don't know off-hand if that's a consequence of moz-appearance or what, but it clearly causes weirdness.

Of course, comment #0 wants us to not fix anything and obey the system theme.

> It would make sense to have either both static or both fixed, so that we
> don't run into these situations of light text on a light background.

Right. But I suspect you don't want us to make some kind of exception for Linux and make the in-content styling entirely consist of system colours... am I wrong? :-)

Comment 12

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #11)
> > It would make sense to have either both static or both fixed, so that we
> > don't run into these situations of light text on a light background.
> 
> Right. But I suspect you don't want us to make some kind of exception for
> Linux and make the in-content styling entirely consist of system colours...
> am I wrong? :-)

Right :)
Since we are dealing with in-content UI here, it makes sense to keep all colors fixed so that they are consistent within the page. Therefore marking this as wontfix.
The fact that we somehow don't override the hover state on Linux seems like a different bug.