1427435 - Allow changing the background tab hover text color and background color

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: Frontend, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

Add the ability to style the hover background and text color of background tabs.

something like:

colors/background_tab_hover
colors/background_tab_hover_text

Comment 1

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi Tim, this has been added to the agenda for the January 23, 2018 WebExtensions APIs triage meeting. Would you be able to join us? 

Here’s a quick overview of what to expect at the triage: 

* We normally spend 5 minutes per bug
* The more information in the bug, the better
* The goal of the triage is to give a general thumbs up or thumbs down on a proposal; we won't be going deep into implementation details

Relevant Links: 

* Wiki for the meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Triage#Next_Meeting
* Meeting agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mc0h5OVd30WBjCORssdifZRXYQrk6WcTqX1cw6ADO9k/edit#
* Vision doc for WebExtensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Vision

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Adding features like this isn't free, e.g. it adds complexity for our "brighttext" detection. Please explain why we should do this.

Comment 3

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hey Tim and Jaws, I'm needinfo'ing you for a response to Dao's comment above. :) This is currently on hold for a design decision.

Comment 4

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [::dao] from comment #2)
> Adding features like this isn't free, e.g. it adds complexity for our
> "brighttext" detection. Please explain why we should do this.

Theme developers want this (an example is the FT Deep Dark theme).

Comment 5

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

I agree that this makes our brighttext detection code more difficult. I wonder if we can sidestep that by requiring that either both background_tab_hover and background_tab_hover_text are set or neither. 

Hmmm... but this might make our [brighttext] CSS selector more complicated to write since we might not want it to apply on hovered tabs when the variables are set.

Until I see a proof-of-concept patch I'm not convinced we should do this.

Comment 6

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

Assigning myself for a poc.

Comment 7

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Tim Nguyen :ntim from comment #4)
> (In reply to Dão Gottwald [::dao] from comment #2)
> > Adding features like this isn't free, e.g. it adds complexity for our
> > "brighttext" detection. Please explain why we should do this.
> 
> Theme developers want this (an example is the FT Deep Dark theme).

When we dropped support for full themes in favor of a simpler model, it was clear that there would be no feature parity. There are things that full themes could do that the theming API won't support. At the same time, theme developers would obviously prefer to be able customize the look freely, so our goals are a bit at odds. The mere fact that there's some demand is not enough to get features added to the API.

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

One thing making the cost/benefit ratio a bit more favorable is that this could also be useful to extensions beyond themes; that's bug 1320585.

Comment 9

[smaksss]

To expand and make more flexible the standard bar for the different needs of all kinds of developers it seems to me more complicated than just giving the ability to create/replace additions to your custom css+html panel anywhere in the browser.
For example, when using horizontal tabs tabs, me a very important multiline. But FF57+ when creating multiline via userChrome.css lost the ability to sort the tabs using drag and drop on the second and subsequent rows. This, again, further development and support. It is easier to take a third-party addition and modify it yourself, than to constantly refer to the support.

Comment 10

[kaxipis289]

Anything new? Default firefox themes change background tab color on hover so why don't give developers and theme creators ability to do this?

Comment 11

[kaxipis289]

You can easily observe this on light theme (on default and dark it's very subtle).