1953650 - Visited links do not have the correct HCM styling

Status: NEW

(UX Systems :: Component, defect)

Description

[Natalie Stroud [:nstroud]]

Attachment: New profile screen with links outlined by orange boxes with orange arrows pointing to them

Prerequisites:

Found on Nightly 138.0a1 (2025-03-26) (64-bit)
Make sure browser.profiles.enabled is set to true
Turn on Windows Night Sky HCM

STR:

Please note: it is important to turn HCM on first and then open Nightly. Otherwise, you may be unable to replicate the issue

1. First, turn Windows Night Sky HCM
2. Open about:newprofile in Nightly and observe HCM styling

Expected / Actual:

HCM visited links should follow the styling below:

Visited:
VisitedText text

Comment 1

[Natalie Stroud [:nstroud]]

Marked as S2 since this also causes a contrast issue. Checking with Morgan Reschenberg on color used for visited links

Comment 2

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Unclear if this should block for 138 as we're doing root cause work for 139. To be continued after discussing with Morgan whether this needs a band-aid fix (and if such a fix is even possible)

Comment 3

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

From KimB: likely not a blocker because the user has selected this specific forced-colors palette

Comment 4

[Natalie Stroud [:nstroud]]

Re-checked issue, looks like link in HCM has the correct styles except for the Visited styling. Please adjust so that when the link is visited, it is using VisitedText

Comment 5

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Attachment: can't reproduce?

Oddly, I'm not able to reproduce this bug on windows with the night sky theme enabled.

The links look correctly shaded purple for me (with the night sky HCM theme), and the styles are being supplied by the common colors stylesheet.

Comment 6

[Natalie Stroud [:nstroud]]

Attachment: Clipping from Dev Tools showing the system colors used for links in Night Sky HCM

Comment 7

[Natalie Stroud [:nstroud]]

Hey Jared! Looks like we both commented at the same time! Please see my comment above and the image attached in comment 6. Thank you!

Comment 8

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Thanks for the needinfo! I guess I won the update race, because I totally missed your comments here.

Hm, with the Night Sky contrast theme applied in windows 11, I do see that the "learn more" visited link style looks the same as the unvisited link style. However, this isn't a new bug; profiles is just using the default link styling that's applied to any "learn more" link. For example, if you look at about:preferences, the link and visited-link styles look exactly the same as they do on the profiles about pages.

In the case where the link has been visited, devtools shows the styles as coming from this spot in common-shared.css. It looks like these styles were last touched by the reusable components team, which makes sense, since the "learn more" link is implemented as a reusable component.

Here's a proposal: since this is not a new bug, and the profiles team is under pressure to ship in 138, and we have other open blockers that need to be resolved in the next few days before 138 goes to beta, I think it might make sense to redirect this bug to the reusable components team, likely a bigger root cause fix/discussion. They can work with you and the design systems folks to correct the "learn more" link styling behavior globally for all the about pages in Firefox. How's that sound?

Comment 9

[Natalie Stroud [:nstroud]]

Hey Jared! Sounds good :) I've updated the bug to reflect the issue about visited links and moved it over to UX Systems > Component

Adding you and Dave Townsend for visibility