1195138 - Dark GUI theme support

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Theme and Visual Design, defect)

Description

[Khvoinitsky Mikhail [:m_khvoinitsky]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Build ID: 20150814092310

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Valid request. Though it seems like a lot of work and light weight themes can substitute for feature request. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?q=dark&cat=themes

Comment 2

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

I imagine we'd just ship a default dark lightweight theme so I'm inclined to WONTFIX this.

Comment 3

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

FWIW, the icons and text are designed to change color to compensate for a dark background so the only improvements we could make by shipping a dark GUI not using lightweight themes would be to use more specific colors, maybe darken the content area in some way (e.g. inverse colors), and maybe change some of the other screens (e.g. tabs tray, which is already dark, or the infrequently used settings so it's not worth it).

The more I think about this, the more I'm thinking WONTFIX.

Comment 4

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

And we wouldn't want to ship a dark theme by default to save APK size (e.g. bug 942609).

Though, maybe we can create a preference for a dark GUI and download the theme at runtime, after prompting the user...

Comment 5

[Khvoinitsky Mikhail [:m_khvoinitsky]]

Dark persona is very poor solution. It makes dark only top bar. A number of fennec's parts remain light:
* new tab page with all of its panels
* main and context menus
* search dialogs (both)
* addressbar
* settings (I agree that it is less important because of rare using)
* something that I've missed
Dark content can be achieved by addons (I'm a developer of such one).

There are a number of reasons why people can prefer dark themes including accessibility. For some people looking at light screens may be hard and/or painful or even harmful.

Comment 6

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Khvoinitsky Mikhail from comment #5)
> Dark persona is very poor solution. It makes dark only top bar. A number of
> fennec's parts remain light:

Okay, that's fair.

> Dark content can be achieved by addons (I'm a developer of such one).

Good to know.

> There are a number of reasons why people can prefer dark themes including
> accessibility. For some people looking at light screens may be hard and/or
> painful or even harmful.

And I am generally one of them so I would agree this seems worthwhile.

I think the best way to do this would be to have everything be a ThemedView and we declare the colors in XML. It'd be a bit of a pain because every view would need "setDarkMode" or similar called on them, though I suppose we can always just traverse the tree.

Comment 7

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

This would be very nice to have now that the default theme is white in Nightly 57.

Comment 8

[Michael Smith [:mismith] (non-bmo mail: [e-mail])]

Private Browsing mode already sets a dark theme, right? Would this be a matter of adding a toggle which sets the same dark theme outside of Private Browsing too?

Comment 10

[Leo_sk]

(In reply to Khvoinitsky Mikhail from comment #5)
> Dark persona is very poor solution. It makes dark only top bar. A number of
> fennec's parts remain light:
> * new tab page with all of its panels
> * main and context menus
> * search dialogs (both)
> * addressbar
> * settings (I agree that it is less important because of rare using)
> * something that I've missed
> Dark content can be achieved by addons (I'm a developer of such one).
> 
> There are a number of reasons why people can prefer dark themes including
> accessibility. For some people looking at light screens may be hard and/or
> painful or even harmful.

Also statusbar remains white in firefox 57+

Comment 11

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

(In reply to Michael Smith [:mismith] from comment #8)
> Private Browsing mode already sets a dark theme, right? Would this be a
> matter of adding a toggle which sets the same dark theme outside of Private
> Browsing too?

As a first step probably yes - we could then always incrementally add Dark Theme support to more places (menus, home panels, etc.) as suggested in follow up bugs.

Also, any solution should probably be generic enough to allow this to be toggled
- for private tabs just as before (and maybe we want to keep some colour changes that are specific to just private mode, like using a different highlight colour (magenta?))
- through the settings menu
- through Reader View's dark mode

Comment 12

[Leo_sk]

So any changes planned, implemented?

Comment 13

[Leo_sk]

Atleast add a about:config entry to switch to private tab style theme in normal tabs before the photon ui lands in stable (please). Other details like highlight colour, menu, home panels can be sorted thereafter

Comment 14

[ktos.obcy]

Huge +1
I've just downloaded the latest beta and it's terribly white. Even current Fx has more greys which are more pleasant to the eye.
Please consider adding proper dark theme. On desktop FxDeveloperEdition has rather nice theme (though it lacks in some places).
Or at least consider using something less #FFFFFF...

Comment 15

[Leo_sk]

Firefox 57 is going to stable branch. Has anything been planned? Personally i will hold on to 56 for some time

Comment 16

[Nameless Voice]

Firefox Nightly fixes the Android top bar for the most part, but the toolbar / address bar section still remains grey instead of the desired colour (e.g. black) when using a dark theme, as if the theme is only being drawn with 50% opacity.

Comment 17

[wojtek]

Any news on this? Currently with substratum and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=substratum.piereligio.bst we can get very nice result:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oow9gn2my3u82d5/firefox-bookmarks.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cy35zubufduv2t3/firefox-new_page.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z5d2yu7sdja3gd7/firefox-settings.png?dl=0

But it would be very nice not to have use such solutions and have beautiful black (dark) theme natively…

Comment 18

[wojtek]

Latest Firefox62 for iOS got dark theme support (vide https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/09/05/latest-firefox-releases-available-today/). I do hope Android variant will get same treatment

Comment 20

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.