469300 - hardcoded colors invisible with some gtk themes

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.18 (20081105)

There are colors which are not taken form the system them and depending on the theme colors they may be low-contrast or completely invisible.

- menu arrows, some button icons (ie the down arrow next to history back, "click to select columns to display", ..) are black. This was fixed in FireFox, you can look at thier solution

- disabled menu items, sample text in search and "click to sort by *" are gray

- links in mail header are blue

Neither of these colors are very useful with my GTK theme.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
the UI is very hard to use due to near invisible text and images

Expected Results:  
The text and images match the installed theme or include enough colors to be visible with different themes

Comment 1

[Jason Oster (:Parasyte)]

I can only confirm the following items are difficult to see with dark GTK themes (tested with "DarkRoom", "New Wave" and "High Contrast Inverse"; all default themes in Ubuntu 9.10):

- "Click to select columns to display" button in tree list
- Disabled menu items

Both of these can be solved with the addition of text-shadow (like GTK does for disabled menu items) and a similar "glow shadow" for icons (like the columns button in tree lists).

Additionally, the menu bar text is black when the "New Wave" GTK theme is used. This uses a dark gray background on the title bar and menu bar. Native GTK applications use a bright (near white) color for menu bar text with this theme. (Bug 496454?)

All of these issues also appear in Firefox. The columns button can be found in the Certificate Manager: Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Encryption -> View Certificates.

This should probably be moved to Toolkit -> Themes.

Comment 2

[Matthew Woehlke]

Links in mail are illegible for me. The foreground and background colors for the mail pane are configurable, the link colors should be as well. That much at least is Thunderbird-specific.

Comment 3

[Jason Oster (:Parasyte)]

I agree, that much is Thunderbird-specific.

CC'ing a few more people to help figure out the way to go about this bug.

Comment 4

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

A better way for our platform to deal with colors would be to always reference values in a centralized place so we could quickly adapt any Mozilla based app to a new OS, or OS theme.  In addition to the accessibility concerns, sprinkling hard coded colors around our code makes it really hard to mesh with the overall aesthetic of the surrounding OS.

Comment 5

[Matthew Woehlke]

Another one: quoted text when composing mail in plaintext seems hardcoded to dark blue; again, not good with light-on-dark color schemes.

Comment 6

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Hopefully this can be of some help: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/CSS/Color_value

Comment 7

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Mass move to the new theme component.

Comment 8

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

Still broken in

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20101125 Thunderbird/3.0.11

invisible items include:

 - links (and probably quotes, headers, etc.)
 - black icons (as opposed to icons rendered in text color)
 - disabled menu items (and probably disabled controls in general)

fixed but working

 - Thunderbird generated HTML content like the welcome page or about page has always white background regardless of system colors but the links are visible on it then
 - colourful icons

Thanks for the CSS page link. This might help fixing some of the issues with user stylesheet but ultimately there should be UI for setting all colors not pulled from the system or such colors should be abandoned.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Michal, how is version 10?

(In reply to Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek from comment #8)
> Still broken in
> 
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20101125
> Thunderbird/3.0.11

Comment 11

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

I do not use Thunderbird anymore.

Comment 12

[inductiveload]

I can confirm this still happens. I am on Linux Mint with a dark system theme. I can successfuly set the background and text colours to system (so dark grey and white). However, quoted text is still dark blue and is very hard to read. There is no UI setting that I can see that can adjust this.

Also the "thread overview" when selecting an unexpanded thread is still rendered with a white background, grey text and a light blue banner at the top.

Comment 13

[Ben]

Using a Cinnamon dark theme "Android_Holo" 1st level quotes are absolutely invisible for me, because their gray is _exactly_ the same of the theme background. 

Any workaround suggestions?

Comment 14

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Don't use the Thunderbird default theme?

I don't know how these will affect Thunderbird but I wouldn't be switching from the default system themes.

bug 1414125, bug 1535761 and bug1689359