325407 - transparent select bg popup is black instead of gray (trunk regression)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Web Painting, defect)

Description

[Pete Holzmann]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060130 Firefox/1.6a1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060130 Firefox/1.6a1

See above example. 

If a select has background: transparent, then when the popup is invoked, all option backgrounds will be black.

In 1.5 and earlier, they are gray.

By default, this means all such select popups are unreadable when users upgrade.
Works fine in 1.5 and earlier

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
See my test case
1. give background: transparent to a select
2. use a set of options
3. weep :(

Actual Results:  
See test case. popup backgrounds are all black

Expected Results:  
Gray (or ideally transparent!) backgrounds.

Comment 1

[Pete Holzmann]

Apology for the loose statement above. It should say "background-color: transparent".

Comment 2

[Pete Holzmann]

(Could this be related to another effect I'm seeing in 1.6a1? Loading pages with large amounts of transparent gif on the page background, I see the entire page quickly flash black before settling down to its proper rendering. Its disconcerting...)

Comment 3

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

I see this too in a trunk build on winxp. Do you know the regression window?

Comment 4

[Pete Holzmann]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I see this too in a trunk build on winxp. Do you know the regression window?

Sorry, I don't have access to a variety of builds.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I highly recommend the testcase be attached to the bug so we can make sure it doesn't go away...

Note that the gray color is not really any more "correct" than black.  See bug 70798.

Also, on Linux I see garbage painting on the backgrounds, not a particular color.

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Ria, can you confirm whether the range in which behavior changed on Windows corresponds to bug 317375?

Comment 7

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

Attachment: testcase from reporter

Comment 8

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

(lost the background images, but the bug is reproducible without them, so I won't try to attach a testcase with images)

Comment 9

[Pete Holzmann]

(In reply to comment #5)
> I highly recommend the testcase be attached to the bug so we can make sure it
> doesn't go away...

I'm happy to keep the testcase in place as long as it's useful. It is running on a rather large pipe... ;)

> Note that the gray color is not really any more "correct" than black.  See bug
> 70798.

Well... it's more "correct" in that popup selection lists generally contain text options, and a black "faux transparent" background is guaranteed incompatible with default text color. 

More important, it's the _change_ that is most disturbing. Arbitrary rendering changes causing sites to break is unfriendly. Particularly when 

Comment 10

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> and a black "faux transparent" background is guaranteed incompatible with
> default text color

There's nothing that says that black is the default text color in this case, fwiw... ;)

And yes, the fact that the thing is not transparent is in fact a bug -- bug 70798

Comment 11

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

(In reply to comment #6)
I think so:
http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsquery.cgi?treeid=default&module=PhoenixTinderbox&branch=HEAD&branchtype=match&dir=&file=&filetype=match&who=&whotype=match&sortby=Date&hours=2&date=explicit&mindate=2006-01-25+16%3A00%3A00&maxdate=2006-01-26+09%3A00%3A00&cvsroot=%2Fcvsroot

Comment 12

[Pete Holzmann]

(In reply to comment #10)
> There's nothing that says that black is the default text color in this case,
> fwiw... ;)

If we only read (w3c) books, agreed. Pragmatic reality speaks quite clearly however: what proportion of browsers have a different default? I've yet to find one ;)

Comment 13

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> what proportion of browsers have a different default?

The default color of options in a <select> in all Gecko browsers is the "FieldText" system color.  So the default depends on the operating system theme being used; it's not black in at least some high-contrast themes on both Windows and Linux.

Comment 14

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Fixed by checkin for 324896.