1214707 - Selected tab background color is dark in Windows7 Classic

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Alice0775 White]

Attachment: screenshot

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]: No reason to change in Windows7 Classic

Selected tab background color is dark in Windows7 Classic since 2015-10-13

Comment 1

[Alice0775 White]

Regression window:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=104c0e6b3b3f7fc3a0437a42cbc120eb5498628f&tochange=afa71e48a9f1

Regressed by:
	fcf23377f9c3	Dão Gottwald — Bug 1184651 - Use flat background instead of gradient for the navigation toolbar on Windows 10 and 8 and Linux. r=jaws

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Alice0775 White from comment #0)
> Created attachment 8673705 [details]
> screenshot
> 
> [Tracking Requested - why for this release]: No reason to change in Windows7
> Classic

Unfortunately, the reason is of technical nature, i.e. the way the tab images are implemented made it hard to limit this change to Windows 10 and 8.

Stephen, does attachment 8673705 [details] look good enough to you or should we try to make the highlight on the tab a bit brighter?

Comment 3

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

Increasing the background opacity to 0.4 should be a general improvement. It will improve the contrast between the navbar and the tabbar on lightweight themes, and will fix this bug as well. It will also make the default gray background pixel perfect compared to the spec (it's #f5f5f5 right now, and should be #f6f6f6).

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Tim Nguyen [:ntim] from comment #3)
> Increasing the background opacity to 0.4 should be a general improvement.

I'd be somewhat concerned about:

* covering up too much of lightweight theme backgrounds
* reducing the contrast for high-contrast themes

Comment 5

[Alice0775 White]

Attachment: screenshot of dark theme

After landing Bug 1184651, it is low contrast and worse in dark theme.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: toolbarHighlight.diff

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #4)
> (In reply to Tim Nguyen [:ntim] from comment #3)
> > Increasing the background opacity to 0.4 should be a general improvement.
> 
> I'd be somewhat concerned about:
> 
> * covering up too much of lightweight theme backgrounds
> * reducing the contrast for high-contrast themes

Ok, considering that the old gradient wasn't particularly great in these areas either, let's try 40% opacity.

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Comment on attachment 8674866 [details] [diff] [review]
toolbarHighlight.diff

Review of attachment 8674866 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I'll test in a bit (building) but here's a question already...

::: browser/themes/windows/windowsShared.inc
@@ +3,5 @@
>   * file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. */
>  
>  %filter substitution
>  
> +%define toolbarHighlight rgba(255,255,255,.4)

This same define exists and is used on Linux as well. Is there a reason we're not keeping them in sync?

Comment 8

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Alice0775 White from comment #5)
> Created attachment 8674854 [details]
> screenshot of dark theme
> 
> After landing Bug 1184651, it is low contrast and worse in dark theme.

I'm probably missing something, but considering the text is white and the background is dark, the active tab's background now being flat black instead of the light-to-black gradient is actually *better* for readability and contrast, right? What part do you think is worse?

Comment 9

[Alice0775 White]

Distinguish between selected tab and background tab. I am not talking about the text.

Comment 10

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This patch suffers from bug 1215526.

As a workaround, we could update the license header in the original tab-selected.svg file to be preprocessed (the end-products currently have 3 license headers because of the different included files...)

Comment 11

[:Gijs (he/him)]

So, I'm fine with the change in principle, I guess, but I don't see it making any real difference for the problem as reported in this bug in terms of how dark the selected tab is. The difference in opacity is noticeable on e.g. a dark lwtheme or a dark windows theme (HCM), but not particularly so on classic.

Ultimately if we want to fix things for classic we'd need a different fgTabTexture, AIUI, specific to classic and applied using media queries. That would likely regress the appearance of some HCM themes though.

Comment 12

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: toolbarHighlight.diff

updated Linux too