1809958 - Allow extensions to specify a different icon for dark themes

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

Attachment: light_and_dark.png

As far as I know, the Unified Extensions Button is the first themed panel to make prominent use of icons. Unfortunately, many extensions fail to provide icons that will have ideal contrast in both light and dark themes. To remedy this problem, I propose that we add something like a dark_icons key to manifest.json

Comment 1

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

Extensions with a custom button can already specify theme_icons (introduced in bug 1329242).
There is not a way to specify an icon for dark themes, but a standardized way to do that would be welcome.

FWIW, there is a discussion on customizing the icons for dark themes at https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/229 .
The discussion seems to have been narrowed towards extension action button icons instead of the extension icon itself, but I wouldn't mind revisiting the discussion to cover extension icons in general.

Comment 2

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

We are going to fix this bug, see also: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/229#issuecomment-1418903935

Comment 4

[Paul Marks]

https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/229#issuecomment-1418903935

We (Mozilla) are going to add support for icons.dark and icons.light as well as action.default_icon.dark and action.default_icon.light

Please don't forget about page_action.

The interim solution (theme_icons) currently works with action but not page_action. Chrome removed page_action years ago, but it's still available on Firefox. My extension (IPvFoo) uses page_action when it can, because an icon in the address bar provides a better user experience... except for this light/dark issue.

Firefox should either maintain feature parity between action and page_action, or remove page_action entirely.

Comment 5

[Kestrel]

Use an SVG icon for the page action to inherit the fill color from the interface. See Multi-Account Containers for reference.

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

Just a suggestion that: mentions of "light" should refer to icons for a light theme, and "dark" should be for icons appropriate to a dark theme.

I just spent a day because in the manifest.json

• theme_icons dark refers to icons suitable for a light theme
• theme_icons light refers to icons suitable for a dark theme

I found this very confusing, others seem to as well: Dark theme_icons are ignored in Manifest v3 extension