1798088 - Poor contrast for extension icons with Alpenglow

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(WebExtensions :: Frontend, defect, P3)

Description

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Attachment: Screenshot 2022-10-28 154524.png

Using the alpenglow theme the black extension icons are nearly invisible.

Comment 1

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

Bug 1784947 is going to fix this bug but not for all extensions (only for extensions with browser actions). We still need to fix this bug for the extensions without browser actions and the easiest way is probably to use a CSS filter (to invert the icon's colors maybe) when a dark-ish theme is used.

Comment 2

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

I think this is also a problem without the unified extensions pref enabled. I am pretty sure that extensions with a dark icon pinned to the overflow menu would also be nearly invisible. This is more obvious in the unified extensions panel, though, since by default all extensions should be listed there.

Comment 3

[Walter K.]

Attachment: dark_theme_illegible_icons.png

The situation with icons is even worse with Dark theme in Dev edition: black and grey icons are almost illegible .

Comment 4

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

(In reply to Walter K. from comment #3)

Created attachment 9308857 [details]
dark_theme_illegible_icons.png

The situation with icons is even worse with Dark theme in Dev edition: black and grey icons are almost illegible .

I think this case is slightly different: it looks like those extensions don't have a browser action, which is why we don't have any alternative other than the default icon.

Comment 5

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

Attachment: Bug 1798088 - Mitigate poor contrast for extension icons with "dark" themes. r?Itiel!

Extensions without a browser action are implemented using "custom
elements" in the extensions panel. At the moment, these extensions
cannot declare different extensions for light and dark themes, see
Bug 1809958. (Extensions with a browser action can already declare
different icons for light/dark themes)

This patch fixes the poor contrast on "dark" themes by inverting
the icon's colors, which is a bit similar to what has been done for
Bug 1702034.

The assumptions here are that (1) an extension (without a browser
action) can only have a single icon at the moment (with different
sizes but that does not change anything here), and (2) the default
Firefox theme (or more common, maybe) is "light" so the extensions
probably have icons that look good with a light theme.

Inverting colors should therefore work in most cases, until we get
Bug 1809958 fixed at least...

Comment 6

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

As pointed out on Phab, fixing this isn't trivial and maybe not even desirable at the moment. All extensions with a browser action can already provide different icons for light and dark themes. The bug is for the other extensions (listed at the bottom of the panel). The "right" solution is to fix Bug 1809958, i.e. allow extensions to provide different icons (for dark and light themes) even if they don't have a browser action (this would also fix a similar issue in about:addons when using a dark theme).

The patch I proposed would generally help but will also make some icons look worse than without any changes. I've talked to Itiel about it already and doing "nothing" for now might be a better approach. We'll want to get Bug 1809958 fixed ASAP, though.

Comment 7

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

We decided to wontfix this bug because the only sane way to fix it is to implement dark/light icons as requested in Bug 1809958.

FTR: extensions with a browser action are not affected by this bug. Developers can already solve this problem because it is possible to specify different icons for browser actions via the theme_icons property.