[MASTER] Firefox 3 RC1: color (grey) used for urls in the awesome bar make them hard to read in multiple themes (human, etc.)

[helios91940]

Binary package hint: mozilla-firefox

Hi!
Today I have upgraded Firefox beta 5 to RC 1 and I think that the new colors of urls in the awesome bar are not enough dark. It's difficult to read grey urls. I preferred when they were dark green.

EDIT: I use the default theme ( tango! ). The only extension that I have is Adblock plus.

[Jo-hermans (jo-hermans)]

what theme are you using ?

[Aditya Kavoor (adityakavoor)]

I am using the default Ubuntu Human theme.

Here is a acreenshot. See the difference between the Beta5 version and RC2 version.

http://img357.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenda2.jpg

[Sylvain Pasche (sylvain-pasche)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 409974 ***

[Dao (dao)]

Bug 409974 was about the use of hard coded colors, which caused problems with certain OS themes. That bug is fixed now. GrayText isn't ideal, though, so this bug is still valid and not a duplicate.

[Aditya Kavoor (adityakavoor)]

Created attachment 324116
Screenshot showing differences between beta 5 and RC2

[Sylvain Pasche (sylvain-pasche)]

If you prefer the old appearance, you can use the following userChrome (see http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Editing+configuration+files#userChrome_css for instructions):

.ac-url-text {
    color: #336633 !important;
}
.autocomplete-richlistitem {
    border-bottom: 1px solid ThreeDShadow !important;
}

(this is from bug 409974 comment 35)

[Aditya Kavoor (adityakavoor)]

Created attachment 324139
Screenshot

I added the code to userchrome.css which indeed gave me what I needed. But I have one problem in that.

When the mouse moves over a particular website in the location bar drop down menu, both the website title and the website address should change color to black there by making it different from the rest.

[helios91940 (florian-plaza)]

Binary package hint: mozilla-firefox

Hi!
Today I have upgraded Firefox beta 5 to RC 1 and I think that the new colors in the awesome bar are not enough dark. It's difficult to read grey urls. I preferred when they were dark green.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

helios91940 wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> Binary package hint: mozilla-firefox
>
> Hi!
> Today I have upgraded Firefox beta 5 to RC 1 and I think that the new colors in the awesome bar are not enough dark. It's difficult to read grey urls. I preferred when they were dark green.
>
> ** Affects: firefox (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Undecided
> Status: New
>
>
Can you please attach a screenshot also what themes are you using? if by
awesome bar you mean URL address bar than it should be white.
If this is an extension please remove it and see if it goes back to
normal. Please list all themes and extensions you are using.

--
Sincerely Yours,
    John Vivirito

https://launchpad.net/~gnomefreak
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JohnVivirito
Linux User# 414246

[helios91940 (florian-plaza)]

Actually when I click on the arrow on the right of the star in url bar I can't make a screenshot. I think it is a bug. I am going to report it.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

reported at least twice here. Maybe a problem that becomes visible in our human theme more than elsewhere. We should take care that this is filed in bugzilla.mozilla.org.

[totya (totya)]

The Awesome Bar was much better in Firefox beta 5.

Here are two screenshots about the problem.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

please search for upstream bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org

[Sylvain Pasche (sylvain-pasche)]

*** Bug 438367 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[helios91940 (florian-plaza)]

According to bugzilla website, if you want to get the beta 5 appearance you need to put the file userChrome.css which is attached in the directory /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/chrome

It should be by default in Ubuntu. What do you think?

[Sayerh Wassim (wsayerh-deactivatedaccount)]

Any update will be released to fix this bug? Because the green colour for the URLs is much better then the grey one :S

[Rob van der Linde (robvdl)]

Wass: it looks like the bug didn't get fixed for Firefox 3 final, which saddens me as it was really so easy to revert. The bug also affects the Windows version of Firefox 3.

Although they may have only seen this bug as cosmetic, what really makes this bug so important are older LCD monitors. At course we have older LCD monitors and we have to remember that on older LCD monitors, it is much harder to distinguish between light grey and white, basically you cannot read the text at all on these monitors as it just appears white.

For now all you can do is apply the userChrome patch, both on Linux and Windows versions of Firefox 3, go into your Firefox user profile directory, then sub-directory chrome, and place the userChrome.css file attached by helios91940

[Derek (bugs-m8y)]

Better set of userChrome.css - even this one is not ideal since a menu item can be selected/highlighted even when the mouse is not hovering over it.
Leads to annoying effect of URL in wrong colour, and fllickering when moving over items. But at least this one handles dark themes.
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

.ac-url-text {
    color: MenuText !important;
    background-color: Menu !important;
}
.autocomplete-richlistitem:hover .ac-url-text {
    color: HighlightText !important;
    background-color: Highlight !important;
}
.autocomplete-richlistitem {
    border-bottom: 1px solid ThreeDShadow !important;
}

[Derek (bugs-m8y)]

Better version - [selected="true"] avoids issues with first one.

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

.ac-url-text {
    color: MenuText !important;
    background-color: Menu !important;
}
.autocomplete-richlistitem[selected="true"] .ac-url-text {
    color: HighlightText !important;
    background-color: Highlight !important;
}
.autocomplete-richlistitem {
    border-bottom: 1px solid ThreeDShadow !important;
}

[Derek (bugs-m8y)]

Attached is an example of how bad it can get.
This is before the above userChrome.css override.
Pretty clear that someone set color without setting background-color.
A basic mistake.

[Dao (dao)]

Created attachment 329283
use -moz-nativehyperlinktext

Note that -moz-nativehyperlinktext falls back to #144fae on OS X.

[Fittysix (fittysix)]

Note that on Vista it was decided in Bug 432757 to use a darker than normal color for .ac-url-text. We might want to leave some of the windows-default-theme fu in there for that. Beltzner?

[Dao (dao)]

Umm, yeah, I expected such things but forgot about that particular bug.

FWIW: We now have the native color that we were trying to hardcode and we should use it unless the native color is broken somehow. Making a native color slightly darker doesn't seem like a proper use case for windows-default-theme. See bug 426660 comment 25. See also bug 431666 comment 5.

[Dao (dao)]

Created attachment 331900
use -moz-nativehyperlinktext in most cases

Talked to beltzner, on XP we're going to stick with green for now.

[Dao (dao)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/index.cgi/mozilla-central/rev/b89f457f432e

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

Text is still only barely visible in Intrepid.

[Lukasz Wisniewski (vishna)]

I can confirm above, this happens with default theme! Please release fix for this before 30 Oct, we don't want one of the most important applications under Ubuntu to get unreadable.

[Sylvain Pasche (sylvain-pasche)]

This is now fixed in Firefox 3.1. Maybe the change could be backported to Ubuntu's version.

[Sylvain Pasche (sylvain-pasche)]

Unfortunately, backporting the change from Firefox 3.1 is not easy. The link uses a new -moz-nativehyperlinktext color alias (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437358) which require a platform change (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426732).

[Stephen-donner (stephen-donner)]

Verified FIXED using:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081020 Minefield/3.1b2pre

on:

mozilla@mozilla-qa:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 8.04.1
Release: 8.04
Codename: hardy

with Human, Mist, Clearlooks, Crux, etc. (in all cases, the URL, as well as the other elements in the location bar, was easy to read, even with the High Contrast themes).

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081020 Minefield/3.1b2pre

Default Windows XP theme has URLs in green; "Windows Classic" returns the URLs' colors to blue.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081020 Minefield/3.1b2pre

Vista's default URL color is blue, and again, "Windows Classic" returns the URLs' colors to blue.

And, finally, on both XP and Vista, I spot-checked high-contrast color schemes, and we respected (and reflected) the color schemes there.

[Stephen-donner (stephen-donner)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081020 Minefield/3.1b2pre should be the last build ID, sorry.

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Marking as "fix committed" since this is fixed upstream.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

This was fixed before Firefox 3.5 was released.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Firefox 3.0 is only receiving Security Updates and major bug fixes at this point.