1784328 - Thunderbird uses white font on white ground in the menu for the highlighted item

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[alex]

Attachment: A screenshot of the menu with the wrong colors

Since the Upgrade to Thunderbird 102.1, the menus use the wrong colors and the color scheme makes them unreadable.

The usual menu had black text on grey background and a blue background with white text for the currently highlighted item, following the Gtk-Theme.

The new menu has a much lighter background and still switches the foreground color to white, but also keeps the background color white, so the highlighted menu item becomes unreadable.

Comment 1

[Terry Watt]

I can confirm the issue exactly as described, on 102.1.2. I have to either pick menu entries from spatial memory or read ahead of the highlight, because the text is impossible to read while highlighted. I updated from 91, so do not know if this impacted earlier versions of 102.

Comment 2

[alex]

Using light theme instead of system theme fixed it for the main menu.
For the context menu, it is also fixed for all items but "Copy Link Location" which still is white on white.

Comment 3

[Terry Watt]

Interesting - that does solve the menu highlight issue, but unfortunately the light theme is basically unusable for me otherwise due to the low contrast (e.g., context menus over other items, little difference between selectable and non-selectable menu items).

The dark theme also solves the menu problem, but I find dark themes very hard on my eyes.

Oddly, the "copy link location" context menu item behaves unlike everything else in all themes. In the dark theme, it picks up my system colors!

I'm old, and "modern" themes just look awful to me, so a fix that works with the system theme would be much appreciated. Back in the last millenium, I never thought I would wish for more old bearded guys involved in software design, but right now I think that might be useful for UI! Certainly soliciting design feedback from more people with minor impairments and visual difficulties would help.

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

I don't see this on Ubuntu, Mint or Fedora. What distro and Linux theme do you use?

Comment 5

[Terry Watt]

I am using XFCE on Debian testing. My preferred theme is "TraditionalOK" which is derived from ClearLooks.

After your comment, I tried various systems themes. Adwaita and some other themes do seem to behave on the menus, although the unusual behavior of the "copy link location" context menu continues, doing something different with nearly every theme. However, about half of the themes on my system (which are mostly XFCE-defaults) do something odd, ranging from no highlight at all on a menu (no visual indicator of what is selected) to the nearly-vanishing highlight that the original post demonstrates.

Nothing changed about my themes at the time I updated, though, so this is a change in how Thunderbird is parsing system information. On my otherwise-identical wife's computer, I held back from updating to 102 and it continues to behave as expected. I feel like something is swapping a foreground/background color or something similar, but I have not dug into the themes to see if that is the case.

For what it is worth, I have never seen this behavior in Firefox, although I skipped directly from 100 to 103 recently so suppose it is possible that 102 had a problem.

Comment 6

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: Bug 1784328 - Use 'disabled="true"' in selector to not match on 'disabled="false"' menus. r=aleca

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/3ae9a448c3c0
Use 'disabled="true"' in selector to not match on 'disabled="false"' menus. r=aleca

Comment 8

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Comment on attachment 9289822 [details]
Bug 1784328 - Use 'disabled="true"' in selector to not match on 'disabled="false"' menus. r=aleca

[Approval Request Comment]
User impact if declined: on Linux it's possible to have unreadable menuitems
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): on c-c
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): low

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9289822 [details]
Bug 1784328 - Use 'disabled="true"' in selector to not match on 'disabled="false"' menus. r=aleca

[Triage Comment]
Approved for esr102

Comment 10

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 102.2.1:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr102/rev/196091b934e1