1720640 - HTML message in dark mode has poor contrast

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Tim]

Attachment: Screenshot 2021-07-15 16.28.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

Steps to reproduce:

I am on Linux (Pop!_OS) using dark theme. I have Thunderbird (78.11.0) built in dark theme enabled.

Actual results:

Some HTML based messages displayed in the reader pane retain a white background but the text displays in light grey and is effectively unreadable. It appears that the background colour in the email is following HTML specification (? perhaps?) but the text is changing to match the dark theme.

This can be overridden by setting:
Preferences->General->Language and Appearance->Colors...

with "Text and Background" set to black text and white background, and "Override the colors..." set to always.

This makes all the messages legible, but loses intended colouration (e.g. colour highlights in text).

Image attached ilustrating the issue. The dark text was composed in thunderbird and was included as a reply in the problem message. I can supply the original email if required .

Expected results:

When a message is displayed in its "natural" HTML, the text should default to black unless otherwise specified and not be overridden by the display theme.

Comment 1

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

I'm on Fedora 34 Workstation, Gnome 40 desktop and don't see an issue using the Adwaita-dark OS theme with the Thunderbird dark theme, but use the Thunderbird default theme which uses the OS theme.

Tim,

What desktop and does the Thunderbird default theme work better with the dark OS theme?

Comment 2

[Tim]

I'm on Pop!_OS, so its gnome 38 underneath.

If I use the theme colours ("Override the colors..." set to always) the text is clear, but any custom colours such as highlighting of important text, if the sender has done that in HTML (e.g. when using outlook formatting), is lost.

If I don't override the colours ("Override the colors..." set to never) in order to see html in the way the sender intended, it seems like the background of the message stays white but text gets set to light grey instead of black and is difficult to read.