1857111 - Black text on black background in tabs on Linux with Adwaita and the System theme when using System Titlebar

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect, P2)

Description

[tobias.bengfort]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open Thunderbird on Linux with Adwaita and the System theme. Also make sure that the window has focus (the colors are fine for unfocused windows)

Actual results:

Unselected tabs have black text on very-dark background which is basically impossible to read.

Expected results:

The text should be white or light grey.

Comment 2

[tobias.bengfort]

I don't think this is a duplicate. 1849509 is about the question how the thunderbird theme should be influenced by system settings. This is about a case in which text in thunderbird is unreadable. That is clearly a bug.

Comment 3

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Hi, thanks for the report.
Could you please attach a screenshot without any private information?

Comment 4

[tobias.bengfort]

Attachment: black_on_black.png

Comment 5

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: Bug 1857111 - [Linux] Use our own colors for the unified toolbar. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Comment 6

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

I can't replicate the issue but my patch uses our own colors to not fall into this issue (I hope).

Comment 7

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

I can't reproduce this. What is weird: in your screenshot is the Spaces toolbarbutton on top left white and the inactive tabs dark. We only set the colour on the #navigation-toolbox and all children inherit this colour except the active tabs. So it seems you have somehow set the inactive tab colour through userChrome.css or something.

Please give exact informations about your setup: Distro, window manager, Linux system theme (Adwaita dark or light), TB theme. And try TB in Troubleshoot mode (see Help menu).

Comment 8

[tobias.bengfort]

I tested this with a fresh profile and noticed that issue only exists when I select "Hide system window titlebar". Maybe that does the trick? Anyway, here is the requested information:

I tried this on different setups:

• Debian bookworm, Sway 1.7, Thunderbird 115.4.1
• Debian bookworm, Openbox 3.6.1, Thunderbird 115.4.1
• Ubuntu 22.04, Openbox 3.6.1, Tunderbird 115.3.1

The Thunderbird theme in all cases is "System Theme — auto".

userChrome.css is empty.

I tried setting the GTK theme with different methods (gsettings, ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini, GTK_THEME, GTK_DEBUG=interactive). None of that had an impact on thunderbird.

The issue appears when I use gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-dark'.

Comment 9

[tobias.bengfort]

I nearly forgot: troubleshoot mode didn't fix the issue either.

Comment 10

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Thanks to Heather and instructions in comment 8 we were able to reproduce.
The key is to uncheck "Hide system window titlebar".

Richard, would you be able to check why the text on the tabs is not properly styled when using the system window titlebar?

Comment 11

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Comment 8 says when I select "Hide system window titlebar" . So the system titlebar is hidden. I can't reproduce this, the tabs are always white for me. Also with the system titlebar I can't reproduce it.

Alex, when you can reproduce it, then can you check from where it gets the black tab text colour?

Comment 12

[Heather Ellsworth]

Attachment: Video showing the issue on Debian/GNOME

What info can I provide to help? Here is a video showing the issue on Debian testing with GNOME and the Thunderbird 115.5.0 flatpak.