1979848 - Thunderbirds text color selection not working when composing email on macOS

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1976738

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[ichuan.hung]

Attachment: Thunderbirds_text_color_selection_not_working_2025-07-29 16.35.58.mov

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I noticed that in version 128.12.0esr (64-bit) (Win 11), the color picker UI has changed.
But in Thunderbirds version: 128.13.0esr (64-bit) or 140.1.0esr (aarch64) on MacOS 15.5,
I clicked the "Text Color" button to open the text color selection:
1. Enter the HTML color string: blue, then click "OK".
2. Click "Color Selection" to open the color picker, select the color and close it, then click "OK".
Both of the above steps do not change the selected text to the selected color when composing an email.
I have tried multiple times and each time same thing happens.

Actual results:

The color of the selected text does not change.

Expected results:

The color of the selected text changes to the selected color.

Comment 1

[sfhowes]

Close the OS X colour picker before you close the TB dialog.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1392360#answer-1540034

Comment 2

[ichuan.hung]

Thanks your replay, but i did :
Close the OS X colour picker before you close the TB dialog.

Another one,
I noticed that problem might be related to the appearance settings in macOS, because I did the following test and found that the screen display was different from the actual situation:
I copied a paragraph with a blue title from a webpage and pasted it into the text of a Thunderbird message, but it showed white text on a black background.
This has the same effect as pasting a memo == white text on a black background!

Furthermore, in Thunderbird, when I select the "last used color" (red) in the "Text Color" setting for another text, it still does not take effect.

However, the emails sent directly to Gmail show the real effect: no background and the text color is the same as the web page (a section with a blue title) + this section of text that was originally ineffective in Thunderbird now works and turns red.

So I'm guessing that selecting "Text Color" in Thunderbird should work, but the screen display isn't updating .
Provided for your reference! Thank you for your efforts!

Comment 3

[sfhowes]

There is another possibility that prevents the text colour from changing - the override setting that has been removed from TB 140:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1503351

Comment 4

[ichuan.hung]

I found On Win11 had :
on version -- 128.13.0esr（64 位元）:
It works: Composing an email does change selected text to the selected color.
-- Settings/ "General" / "Font & Color "
with a button "Color"
It is set on only when using a high-contrast theme, not Never or Always.

**on version -- 140.1.0esr（**aarch64）(after restart Thunderbird ):
	It works: Composing an email does change selected text to the selected color.
	-- Settings/"General"/ "Language & Fonts"/ Fonts
		**the button "Color" is disappeared .**

And I compared above UI on MacOS 15.5 :
It doesn't work: Composing an email does not change selected text to the selected color.
on version -- 140.1.0esr（aarch64）(after restart Thunderbird ):
-- Settings/"General"/ "Language & Fonts"/ Fonts
the button "Color" is disappeared .
So I can't view the settings of Color, after I first installed .

Comment 5

[paul.hugo]

I reverted back to release 115.18.0, a bit a pain to do since you have to create a new profile. Lo and behold, the colors work as they use to. So release 128 and beyond removed the color button as stated comment 3 above. IT NEEDS TO BE PUT BACK or put someplace else.

There is a workaround. I figured out the color button and override in versions before 128 changes the config parameter browser.display.document_color_use. To make colors work before you had to set it to never which is a value of 1. Most of us probably had it set to never but with release 128, it changed it 0 which is "Only with High Contrast themes"

The workaround is to go to the config editor (settings => General, scroll to the very bottom on the right side) in the search bar enter color_u and you'll get the parameter browser.display.document_color_use. The value will probably be 0. Click on the pencil and change it to 1. (in my case, when I typed in a 1, the 1 didn't show until I saved it, (click the check).

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Bug 1942381? Or bug 1976738?

Comment 7

[paul.hugo]

Bug 1976738. To me it looks like Bug 1956292 was suppose to remove the color control and replace it with contrast control but the contrast control didn't get added.