1863650 - Add support for custom color schemes to Reader Mode

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Reader Mode, enhancement)

Description

[jboehme05]

Attachment: custom-reader-themes-poc.png

Steps to reproduce:

N/A

Actual results:

Currently Reader Mode only supports toggling between a light theme, a dark theme, and a sepia theme.

Expected results:

I think a useful addition to reader mode would be support for custom color themes. This change does not address any open bugs.

I have been working on implementing it, and have an early proof of concept completed. There's still a significant chunk of work to be done before I'd consider it ready:

• Minor touchups to fix the readability of the value settings
• Currently, it uses <input type="color"> as the source of input. This works, however it defers to the system color picker dialogue, and Windows color picker is extremely old. I know Firefox has a native color picker, and I'd like to look more into preferring that over the system dialogue.
• I'd like the ability to determine a secondary color for any color automatically, so that the reader mode dialogue box has greater contrast with the current reader mode.
• Custom settings are not currently saved in preferences

I can complete all of the above, however @sfoster notified me over on the Matrix chat that there are plans to implement theme functionality in reader mode sometime next year. This raises some further discussion.

• Would the maintainers prefer that I hold off on this until work on that begins? Should work on that begin, is there any way I could contribute?
• Should I attempt to make this change in a way that completes some of the "grunt work" for further planned changes in the future?
• Should I complete the feature addition and submit it for the short term? I am not a very experienced developer, and have never contributed to Firefox before, so helping me through this process would probably place more strain on maintainers than a more experienced developer would, and I don't want to do that for a temporary change.

Thank you for your time!

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

Thanks for filing this. Yeah as I mentioned in matrix, I wanted to get a bug on file in part to try and understand the use case and see if this was a fix for an observed deficiency with the current options or an individual preference. Also, because every patch needs to be associated with a bug, and bugzilla is ultimately our historical record and source of truth for the "why" of every change we make.

I'm aware of there being some exploratory work to improve the color options in reader mode, but so far this has been informal and isn't far enough advanced to be able to file bugs or hand you a spec. We were looking at expanding the number of foreground/background preset options, but I can also see the value in providing a color picker to let the user select their own. Thinking about it, these don't have to be mutually exclusive, but I suspect we would want to re-design the options panel a bit to support a richer set of options in that case.

Before investing too much more time in implementing your idea, we should get some consensus on the proposed feature and UX. I feel like the custom colors option belongs with the other color swatches (Light, Dark , Sepia etc.) but clearly there isn't room for another on that row.

:Gijs, flagging you just because this is an enhancement request so is likely to skip your triage queue. Can you suggest best next steps?

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him) from comment #2)

Before investing too much more time in implementing your idea, we should get some consensus on the proposed feature and UX. I feel like the custom colors option belongs with the other color swatches (Light, Dark , Sepia etc.) but clearly there isn't room for another on that row.

:Gijs, flagging you just because this is an enhancement request so is likely to skip your triage queue. Can you suggest best next steps?

You'd want to find a UX person to at least review the idea / proof of concept here, or to sign off on shipping this without UX review.

Comment 4

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

Ok I have found the right people to ask. I think in broad strokes we probably want to separate out the color selection from the typography settings. That would gives us the space to have some preset color themes and the user-selected colors and color picker proposed here.

But, that in turn might mean re-considering the settings toolbar design as we can't just keep adding new buttons on there before it starts to become unwieldy. So, I'm sorry this is moving slowly jboehme05. I'll update here when I have more news and a spec to build to.

Comment 5

[jboehme05]

No worries, take your time :)