2014672 - ActiveCaption color is used for GUI elements too much with Windows Contrast themes

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Theme, enhancement)

Description

[3be]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:145.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/145.0

Steps to reproduce:

Switch to any Windows Contrast theme

Actual results:

ActiveCaption color is used for the tab bar, menu bar, bookmark bar and sidebar (with vertical tabs).

Expected results:

ActiveCaption color should be visible only for the area that replaces the title bar.

Comment 1

[3be]

Attachment: firefox 149.0a1 (2026-02-04) - Aquatic Windows theme.png

Comment 2

[3be]

I think the ActiveCaption color should be used only for the small height area that replaces the title bar, as it is in File Explorer and Notepad. Or even better, maybe it should be completely replaced with the Canvas color as it is in Chromium browsers.

Firstly, the ActiveCaption color is not user configurable, at least not for an average person through the Settings dialog, but only within the registry. So, the users are limited to just 4 colors for ActiveCaption since there are only 4 native Windows contrast themes.

Secondly, I know just a few standard Windows application that are using that color other than in their title bar, e.g. the old Windows Photo Viewer.

By the way, I am using Windows 11 with its Contrast themes. The previous screenshot is for the fresh installation of Firefox without any changes in its settings.

Comment 3

[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 4

[3be]

Well, I am just an user and I don't know how you have organized Firefox internally, but I don't think this is related to the Firefox themes. The Firefox themes are ignored with Windows Contrast themes since v146. Which was wrong in my opinion, because I think that many users liked to use Firefox themes even with Windows Contrast themes. Yeah, I am still with v145 because of that.

Comment 5

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Thank you for the enhancement suggestion.

Setting as NEW so the developing team can have a look.

Comment 6

[3be]

I forgot to mention one very important thing. Firefox used ActiveCaption color for the tab/menu/... bars until v116, then it switched to AccentColor in v117. However, that was even worse solution, reported in bug 2007306 and reverted back to ActiveCaption in Nightly 149.0a1 (2026-02-04).