1776588 - Using Windows accent color makes text highlighting in the URL bar almost invisible for me

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1776556

(Core :: CSS Parsing and Computation, defect)

Description

[Caspy7]

Attachment: Dark mode URL Bar example

I'm on Windows 11.

The other day I noticed on Nightly that when I start typing in the URL bar the autocomplete text had no highlight. This was disorienting for me because I couldn't readily tell where I'd stopped typing. Only after chatting with someone today did I realize it's not missing but rather very similar to the background.

I get a lot of light sensitivity so I dark mode everything and chose a darker Windows accent color ("Storm") as well. Turns out Storm is quite similar to the focused URL bar background color. The situation for me is further exacerbated as I have my display set to reduce blue from all colors, making the accent color and URL bar color even harder to tell apart. That is to say, if you're not running this filter on your display it's probably easier to discern the two.

Using the accent color for text highlighting seems like it could be inconsistent with other apps. Notepad and Edge (both currently reflecting a dark mode) use a blue for highlighting text with Edge using an even lighter (excessively so IMO) blue in the URL bar.
I'm unsure if I have an objection to using it for web content, but for the URL bar it's made for a poor experience for me.

See attached screenshots

Comment 1

[Caspy7]

Attachment: Chosen Accent Color

Comment 2

[Caspy7]

Attachment: Notepad Example

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Set release status flags based on info from the regressing bug 1775310

Comment 4

[laszlo]

Attachment: Accent color "Overcast" example, Windows 10

I had the same problem a few days ago, I immediately set widget.windows.uwp-system-colors.enabled to false and forgot about it. I'm on Windows 10, my accent color is "Overcast" (directly to the left of "Storm", RGB 118,118,118). It's not as bad as in Caspy7's case, but still hard to see in the dark theme.

By the way, the resulting highlight color is not exactly "Overcast", but darker (RGB 79,79,79), which makes the situation even slightly worse. Is that intended?

Comment 5

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

I'll restore to previous behavior in bug 1776556 for now.

We do have code to avoid selection contrast issues like these inverting the colors if needed, but they're not working because on the dark theme the front-end uses the ::selection pseudo here, which we honor to the letter.

Arguably the built-in dark theme should probably set its own selection colors rather than relying on the default ones, but...

(In reply to laszlo from comment #4)

By the way, the resulting highlight color is not exactly "Overcast", but darker (RGB 79,79,79), which makes the situation even slightly worse. Is that intended?

Yes, but it's definitely not great for grey-ish accent colors on dark backgrounds... It seems to match what Windows does in e.g. the settings app search box or the windows search bar (but Windows forces light backgrounds on those so it's not amazing).

Anyways can revisit after the soft-freeze, for now reverting to the previous behavior while keeping a pref for the code seems reasonable.