1835472 - Focused pane selection color in the Library is now too bright on Windows

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[aoia7rz7l]

Tested on 113.0.2.

STR:

1. Open the Library.
2. Notice the color for the selected item(s).

Expected Behavior:

Focused pane selection color in the Library uses whatever color Windows 7/10 uses in the File Explorer, even after migrating to non-native themes (not that they do so in Proton but hey).

Actual Behavior:
Focused pane selection color in the Library is now so bright that it actually makes the gray color looks good. It's not as bad with the proton teal color in dark mode but then you get teal background against black text, which is also pretty bad to be honest. For some reason the same color (in both light/dark themes) looks much more tolerable when I am selecting multiple items in the Library.

Mozregression returned

Last good revision: b043e43853792ed5a7e690651119ab8eed370e7f
First bad revision: 9361e4b16e0b9742b2922590a963a6b416134ed5
Pushlog: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/pushloghtml?fromchange=b043e43853792ed5a7e690651119ab8eed370e7f&tochange=9361e4b16e0b9742b2922590a963a6b416134ed5

Examples of more a reasonable color in light themes would be the color you get when highlighting text with a cursor on hg and phabricator. I would also argue that for dark themes, the focused pane selection color should be changed to teal background against white text, similar to how text were highlighted when using the Find in Page option.

I would also like to point out that bug 1717260 actually does not affect linux builds, even in the case of ESR 102. And that's probably because someone took the time and effort in making it look nice, which I really doubt will survive when someone else decided to do another UI overhaul.

If there's no intention to improving this further, can we at least consider backing this out until after ESR 115 (where Win7 support ends) landed? Personally I would rather live with gray then a color too bright.

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Theme' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

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

Setting Regressed by field after analyzing regression range found by mozregression in comment #0.

Comment 3

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

:imlata1111, since you are the author of the regressor, bug 1717260, could you take a look?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This is the expected behavior, and it's necessary to distinguish the currently focused tree. The sidebar is likely to follow in the future (but the sidebar styling is a mess atm). We tried different shades of grey to see if we could come up with an acceptable one, but it was too subtle to differenciate the focused and selected status, it was not usable.
The current colors are coherent with the design per https://acorn.firefox.com/latest/styles/color.html#section-accent-c2 but we toned down the teal color a little bit to avoid excessive brightness, and we think the current one is a good compromise.

Unless there's an objective reason to change it, I think this is a wontfix, because changing this color in practice means completely redesigning the Librare theme (we should change the background color, and all the rest to cope with it), and at that point it would just follow the main window theme anyway, that uses teal.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Note: if teal in general is an issue for the Dark theme, it would be more useful to file a bug to try convince changing the Dark theme colors as a whole.