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Frankly, I don't want to choose firefox. Their priorities are utterly misplaced. I can't believe people don't talk about the dark gtk theming bug more often. I

Frankly, I don't want to choose firefox. Their priorities are utterly misplaced. I can't believe people don't talk about the dark gtk theming bug more often. It's one of the most common firefox questions on stackoverflow: If you have a dark gtk theme, like Arc-dark or Adwaita-dark, then Firefox randomly colors certain web page elements (usually text boxes) dark to match your desktop theme. Almost always resulting in black text on a black background. There are examples of this misbehavior on mozilla.org THIS BUG HAS BEEN OPEN FOR 18 YEARS https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315 If something so obvious and so easy (why not make white the default background color, like every other browser) has gone unfixed for so long, despite its manifestation on their own home page, then why wouldn't I expect that there are tons of other common sense things that Mozilla has totally ignored, waiting for me to stumble upon them like so many land mines?

Yoric 8y ago
Since it's so critical to you, and if it's so obvious (I haven't checked, I take your word on it), would you consider submitting a patch to fix this issue? I can guide you on patch submission, if you need.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  Patches have been submitted, tons and tons of times, and are always rejected. The maintainers say "it's the website's fault for not respecting the user's theming preferences" even as their own website does it. They've been saying that user theming will sweep over the web and this issue will fix itself since the year 2000.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    > They've been saying that user theming will sweep over the web Of course not, it's an OS feature. Not everything is about the web.
bzbarsky 8y ago
There were lots of requests to have form controls "look native", which is why they were changed to use the desktop theme... One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color but not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101 mistake. But there's just no way to win here: either you can use the OS theme for widgets and things fail when sites make this mistake, or the widgets don't look "native".
- jcranmer 8y ago
  But... but... I want to have my cake and eat it too!
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  > One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color but not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101 mistake. If it works correctly for 99.9% of users (those who aren't running linux, with firefox, with a dark GTK theme), than it isn't a mistake on the part of the website, it's a bug on the part of the browser. User theming is not about to sweep over the web. It didn't happen in 2000 when this bug was first opened. The web has changed a lot since then, we've seen web 2.0 and the dawn of the social internet. But there are zero signs of a user-defined theme revolution. AFAIK themes still don't exist in Windows and OSX. It is absurd to continue to insist that the issue is about to fix itself, as maintainers have done on the bug report I linked.
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    > AFAIK themes still don't exist in Windows and OSX. They exist just fine on Windows. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13768/desktop-themes-featured https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13768/desktop-theme... for example, and there's a number of themes that ship with Windows by default, including several "dark" themes. On Mac I am not aware of themes per se, but there are accessibility options that have similar effects. Again, what is your specific proposed solution? Stop using the current theme entirely when painting controls? You can sort of test what that looks like by putting "-moz-appearance: none" on some controls; then tell me whether that's what people using a non-dark GTK theme actually want. Or do you have some other concrete proposal?

Yoric 8y ago

Since it's so critical to you, and if it's so obvious (I haven't checked, I take your word on it), would you consider submitting a patch to fix this issue? I can guide you on patch submission, if you need.

hannasanarion 8y ago
Patches have been submitted, tons and tons of times, and are always rejected. The maintainers say "it's the website's fault for not respecting the user's theming preferences" even as their own website does it. They've been saying that user theming will sweep over the web and this issue will fix itself since the year 2000.
- anoncake 8y ago
  > They've been saying that user theming will sweep over the web Of course not, it's an OS feature. Not everything is about the web.

bzbarsky 8y ago

There were lots of requests to have form controls "look native", which is why they were changed to use the desktop theme... One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color but not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101 mistake. But there's just no way to win here: either you can use the OS theme for widgets and things fail when sites make this mistake, or the widgets don't look "native".

jcranmer 8y ago
But... but... I want to have my cake and eat it too!
hannasanarion 8y ago
> One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color but not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101 mistake. If it works correctly for 99.9% of users (those who aren't running linux, with firefox, with a dark GTK theme), than it isn't a mistake on the part of the website, it's a bug on the part of the browser. User theming is not about to sweep over the web. It didn't happen in 2000 when this bug was first opened. The web has changed a lot since then, we've seen web 2.0 and the dawn of the social internet. But there are zero signs of a user-defined theme revolution. AFAIK themes still don't exist in Windows and OSX. It is absurd to continue to insist that the issue is about to fix itself, as maintainers have done on the bug report I linked.
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  > AFAIK themes still don't exist in Windows and OSX. They exist just fine on Windows. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13768/desktop-themes-featured https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13768/desktop-theme... for example, and there's a number of themes that ship with Windows by default, including several "dark" themes. On Mac I am not aware of themes per se, but there are accessibility options that have similar effects. Again, what is your specific proposed solution? Stop using the current theme entirely when painting controls? You can sort of test what that looks like by putting "-moz-appearance: none" on some controls; then tell me whether that's what people using a non-dark GTK theme actually want. Or do you have some other concrete proposal?