2053070 - Low contrast for hovered and active tabs with contrast enabled macos

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect, P2)

Description

[Sarah Clements [:sclements]]

A user reported that hovered and active are difficult to distinguish with Increase Contrasted enabled on macOS.

STR:
Enabled Increase Contrast in macOS Settings, then hover the tab next to your active tab

See if this makes sense to fix as part of bug 2053068.

Comment 1

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Access s3 because there is a workaround (albeit an annoying one): temporarily stop hovering any tab.

Comment 2

[Nikki Sharpley (:nikkis) (she/her)]

Jules, I just want to double check we are getting the correct values for these hover states from Figma. https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/rev/d83a08d81de20f3b72db70f531fad19090e1db4b/browser/themes/shared/tabbrowser/tab.tokens.css#156 looks like its applied on hover in contrast mode.

Comment 3

[Nikki Sharpley (:nikkis) (she/her)]

I suspect this will be resolved with bug 2058216

Comment 4

[Mark Striemer [:mstriemer]]

Seems like this was fixed by bug 2046942 which changed the selected tab background colour. Without a screenshot it's a bit hard to tell what the exact scenario is that looks bad

On July 7 Nightly the selected and hovered tabs both had a light grey background on macOS increase contrast in dark mode. After bug 2046942 the selected tab has a dark grey/black background and the hovered tab is still a light grey

The bug seems to be suggesting the contrast between the active and selected tab is hard to tell, which could make it hard to differentiate which is which

The contrast of the text and background for the hovered tab is possibly somewhat low by eyeballing it. This seems to be due to dimming all non-selected tabs to 0.7 opacity and it's unrelated to the design tokens/Figma: browser/themes/osx/browser.css

Comment 5

[Simona Badau, Desktop Test Engineering]

Reproduced the initial issue using Nightly 154.0a1 on macOS 26 (visible when dark theme is enabled).

Verified as fixed using the latest Nightly 155.0a1 on macOS 26 - the contrast difference between the hovered and active states is now appropriate when the dark theme is enabled.