1402598 - Themes/Appearances/Personas look faded and bleached

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Theme and Visual Design, defect, P3)

Description

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

Attachment: good.png

STR:
1. Install some Light Theme/Appearance/Persona
and see that it looks faded and bleached

Comment 1

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

Attachment: bad.png

Comment 2

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

I guess it's to enhance the contrast with the tool bar buttons, although given that the URL itself is now faded separately (since bug 1389164 I think), it might be possibly to tone the fading down on the rest of the tool bar in return?

Also note that lightweight themes specify a text colour that is used on Desktop to provide sufficient contrast between the text in the UI and the theme itself, so (leaving the URL display itself as it is), maybe we should be using that colour for the rest of the toolbar icons instead of fading the whole instead?

Comment 3

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

(In reply to Jan Henning [:JanH] from comment #2)
> Also note that lightweight themes specify a text colour that is used on
> Desktop to provide sufficient contrast between the text in the UI and the
> theme itself, so (leaving the URL display itself as it is), maybe we should
> be using that colour for the rest of the toolbar icons instead of fading the
> whole instead?

Although doing a non-representative study on Desktop with one theme (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/batik-firefox/), the results were actually worse that way and we probably would have been better off staying with black toolbar buttons, so maybe we should test a few dark themes and see how far the fading can be reduced to make them less washed out without turning the black toolbar buttons totally invisible?

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Also visible e.g. with the second and third themes from the left in https://bug1403653.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8912886, where the darker bits do look a little *too* washed out.

Comment 5

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

NI UX Team

Comment 6

[Jack Lin[:jacklin]]

Ni visual designer.

Comment 7

[Jack Lin[:jacklin]]

Ni visual designer.

Comment 9

[Carol Huang [:Carol]]

Hi! Thank you for the feedback!
I'm working on tweaking the LWT design on Bug 1407923
Hopefully we could show the theme more clearly and increase the legibility of the URL as well.

Comment 10

[The0x539]

Attachment: solid black LWT

Would it be possible to, on API21+, have the status bar be translucent, showing the theme image behind the icons? The status bar shown in Bug 1407923 seems to only be a slight improvement over always-white.

Comment 12

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

With a very dark theme like this example from bug 1411457 [1], our toolbar buttons still don't look to great and the contrast between the buttons and the background is rather meh. So I suppose we should probably still give setting the button colour based on the theme a try - once the infrastructure for changing the button colour is in place, we could always experiment and see which one out of
- using the colour provided by the theme
- just switching between black and white depending on whether we've classified the theme as light or dark
- guessing a contrasting colour ourselves with the help of the Palette library
- ...?
gives the best results.

[1] https://bug1411457.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8921681

Comment 13

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

All themes look faded and bleached, not only dark ones, please see my attachments.

I don't know why we don't use the same color palette for buttons in Firefox Mobile, like it's in Firefox on desktop,
so black buttons for light themes and white buttons for dark themes,
of course if theme author didn't especially marked which colors should be used for foreground text and for background.
But instead we fading and bleaching theme colors, which don't look like theme author wanted at all.

Comment 14

[jwms]

Why does FFox for Android need themes in the 1st place?  It amounts to a tiny sliver of color change.

Comment 15

[Kenneth B]

Bug 1098544(In reply to jwms from comment #14)
> Why does FFox for Android need themes in the 1st place?  It amounts to a
> tiny sliver of color change.

For devices affected by Bug 1400508, using a theme is the only way to change the color of the status bar.

Comment 16

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

There is no any logical reason to forbid/ban using Themes only for Firefox Mobile, while this feature exist for all Firefox platforms.

Comment 17

[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.

Comment 18

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

I'm marking this bug as WONTFIX, as Mozilla dropped support for Fennec.