1422143 - Allow browserAction and pageAction icons to blend in by using theme colors

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(WebExtensions :: Frontend, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Adrian [freundTech]]

When creating a browserAction/pageAction a webextension can provide an icon for it. In the case of browserAction it is also possible to provide 2 icons. One for light and one for dark themes.

Build-in toolbar and url bar icons change their color bases on the current theme. Icons added by webextensions can't do that and will therefor look out of place.
While supplying a dark and light theme version for a browserAction makes sure that the icon is always visible it will still look out of place, as build-in icons can have any color.

I would suggest implementing a way to have a monochrome browserAction/pageAction icon be recolored to the color supplied by the theme.

I don't know how build-in icons are handled, but I would guess, that this could be handled in the same/a similar way.

This feature could be enabled in the webextension manifest.json for example by adding a "recolor_icon: boolean" key to the browser_action and page_action sections or by making the "dark" and "light" keys inside the theme_icons section optional and adding a new "auto" key to it.

I'm not sure how multicolored icons should be handled. One option would be to not recolor them and throw a warning.

This would also help with bug #1408577, as when an icon is dragged into the tab bar it could use automatically switch to the color used by build-in icons in the tab bar.

Comment 1

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

(In reply to Adrian [freundTech] from comment #0)
> Build-in toolbar and url bar icons change their color bases on the current
> theme.

Can you provide an example of a theme where this happens? I only see the built-in icons change between light and dark, not to different colors.

Comment 2

[Adrian [freundTech]]

Attachment: Demo theme - manifest.json

Yes. I attached a manifest.json of a small demo theme I created.
The "textcolor" property controls the build-in toolbar icon color (unless the "toolbar_text" property exists. Then that one controls it).
The "toolbar_field_text" property controls the build-in pageAction icon color.

This is not limited to installed themes, but can also happen with the default theme on linux, where the font color of the GTK theme is used for both.

Comment 3

[Andy McKay]

We'd like to be able to use SVG for this but are stuck on platform support as per bug 1391980 and bug 1367042. We should probably just dupe to one of those. Or file a new bug. I'm really not sure what to do next to be honest.

Comment 4

[Kuba Niewiarowski]

Looks like duplicate of bug 1367042 to me.