1738339 - Change fallback styles for Urlbar box to not require the use of theme_experiment in colorway themes

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Theme, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Harry Twyford]

UX defined how they want the Urlbar box to look like in themes with the colorway spec. The current fallback styles were engineering-defined. We should just use the look introduced by colorway themes in third-party themes so we can remove the urlbar-box-* properties from the colorway themes.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Amy, are you still going to work on this?

Comment 2

[Amy Churchwell [:amy]]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [::dao] from comment #1)

Amy, are you still going to work on this?

That's the plan, however, Harry and I met about it yesterday and determined that some considerations have to happen for lightweight image themes, .etc, and it was a little less straightforward than we thought.

Harry, maybe I should unassign myself from this and pick up something different?

Comment 3

[Harry Twyford]

Amy and I found that it's probably not possible to create a blanket Urlbar box style that works with all themes. The Bold and Soft colorways make the Urlbar box look like the active tab. When the Urlbar is focused, it takes on the same colors as the toolbar. The Balanced colorways use the frame color for the box background and the toolbar color for the text. It's also the same colors as the toolbar when the Urlbar is focused.

We considered making the Bold/Soft colors the default and then continuing to use a custom override in Balanced themes. However, there are two issues:

• lw themes with images often have random background colors, so making the Urlbar box the same color as the toolbar looked bad (including in Alpenglow)
• In themes where the toolbar is the same color as the Urlbar, making the box in the focused Urlbar the same color as the toolbar made the box's background invisible.

It seems we have to continue to use secondary button colors for the Urlbar box as the fallback. Dao, do you see another way forward?