91708 - Text selection colors should be inverse

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 56314

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Ben Ruppel]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.2+)
Gecko/20010719
BuildID:    2001071903

Right now it seems that when one drags to select text, the result is a box with
the selected text in white and the background in black (although sometimes the
background is gray, esp if the page no longer has focus, but I've seen it other
times too).  This is okay, except when the page already has white text on a
black background as the norm.  This makes it tough to see what you've selected.
 NS4.x would use inverse colors of the selected text and background.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.select text on a page with white text on a black background

Actual Results:  You can't see the selection because it is set to white on black

Expected Results:  The colors should be inversed--black on white

I'm surprised I couldn't find a dup, and please forgive me if I missed it.

Comment 1

[timeless]

.

Comment 2

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

On Windows any platform, this is very easy to duplicate..  even on this page.

Simply go to your Control Panel, Display Properties, Appearance Tab, and choose
the "Selected Items" item in the select box below.  Change the appearance so
that the text is black and the background is set to white.  Select any text on
this page.  You will not see what you are selecting.

I think I've seen this bug before...  searching.

Comment 3

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Marking NEW for now and over to selection.  Kick back if I'm wrong.

Comment 4

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Kicking back, then.

Most pages have dark text on a light background. If text selection was made
inverse, people would whine -- especially since selecting text on a
white-on-black page is an easy way of temporarily turning it into dark-on-light
and making it easy to read.

Possible ideas for a solution:
*   detect whether the selection color is reasonably similar to the background
    color, and invert only in that case;
*   include a 1px border (or maybe a bevel, like in Tk) around the selection, so
    you can see it even if the background is the same color.

Comment 5

[Ben Ruppel]

You're right, selection shouldn't be inverse, it should just be dark / light.  
Change the summary?

Comment 6

[Ben Ruppel]

okay, I just found something out that may have been cause for confusion: on
win32 text selection color follows system settings.  On my system I set it to
white/black, so on pages with white text on black background, selected areas
can't be seen.  Perhaps moz should detect dark backgrounds and inverse the
user-specified colors (making it black text on white background automatically,
in my case).  This seems to be what IE5.5 does.

Comment 7

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 56314 ***