1702034 - Extension buttons in the location bar are very hard to see with the Proton Dark theme

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect, P2)

Description

[Robin Steuber (they/them) [:bytesized]]

Attachment: location bar icons.PNG

The screen shot attached contains shows the "Reader Mode" button, the "In-Page Pop-up Reporter" button, the "Always open this in a Container" button, and the Bookmark button. The "Reader Mode" and Bookmark buttons look fine, but the other two buttons are extremely hard to see.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Drew pointed out this code in svg that disables context paint for add-ons that are not mozilla-signed:
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/acafeda74c3b263264ddb9fb21c45bb67d0de267/layout/svg/SVGContextPaint.cpp#52-56

Jared, Dholbert, do you have additional insight about that disabling?
It seems to make things worse, could we provide some kind of opt-in add-on authors can use in the file itself, rather than completely disabling it?

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Caitlin offered to notify add-on authors about changes they could make to improve the situation.
In the worst case we should workaround this somehow, maybe adding a lighter background to these icons.

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #1)

Drew pointed out this code in svg that disables context paint for add-ons that are not mozilla-signed:
[...]
Jared, Dholbert, do you have additional insight about that disabling?

Sure -- SVG "context paint" is not in any standard; it's intended as a temporary proprietary hack that we'll unsupport in the future. As such, it's not something that we want to expose to any code/content that we don't ourselves have the power to rewrite.

We're anticipating that a better solution will be standardized in the future (as part of SVG and/or CSS), at which point we fully intend to rip out support for context-paint and rewrite all of our code that uses it to use the new thing instead. If we broaden it to work in third-party add-ons, then we won't be able to do that without breaking a bunch of add-ons.

It doesn't help to give add-on authors a way to "opt-in"; if they use it at all, we'd kinda be blocked from unsupporting it as long as any add-ons are actively depending on it.

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(See bug 1379464 comment 3 where jwatt said basically the same thing.)

Note that we're not intending to "privilege" Mozilla's own add-ons here, even if that's kind of the current state of things. The context-paint feature/hack was only really meant to be used by our built-in UI; and some pieces of our built-in UI happen to be packaged as WebExtensions (e.g. Firefox Screenshots apparently was); that's the only reason this works in any extensions at all. (And of course, Mozilla-authored WebExtensions trivially fall into the bucket of "stuff that we can immediately rewrite as soon as a better solution is available, so that we can unsupport context paint", which is why we were kinda-OK allowing this hack to work for them.)

Comment 5

[Harry Twyford]

In Slack, ntim suggested applying a slight brightness filter to these icons in brighttext. Maybe filter: brightness(120%)? Marco also suggested we could style them as chiclets to set them off from the background, but that might be distracting.

Comment 6

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

I don't think this is a Proton regression and as such we should remove it from blocking proton-address-bars (or at least make this non-regression obvious).

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

While not technically a regression, this bug is actually caused by Proton Dark, that will be a commonly used theme.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I'll experiment a bit and see how we can improve the situation.

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Attachment: Bug 1702034 - Extension buttons in the location bar are very hard to see with the Proton Dark theme. r=harry

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/1e9779538e94
Extension buttons in the location bar are very hard to see with the Proton Dark theme. r=harry,desktop-theme-reviewers,rpl

Comment 11

[Andreea Pavel [:apavel]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/1e9779538e94