Preferences have black text on dark background and are thus not legible in high contrast mode

[gene-git]

Bug description

FYI
AEP version 0.9.1
Thunderbird 102.0.1

The preferences tab in addons has black text on very dark/black background.
Drop-downs, radio boxes and a slider are all fine as is the "linked" text at bottom (license file etc).

Linux with dark kde plasma heme and TB general colors set to white text/navy background (override always).

The other sections are legible but not brilliantly so (Details, Permissions and Release notes).
These are faint off white on dark background. Not great but legible.

[rugk]

Could you provide a screenshot please, maybe? 😊

Also, does that only happen in Thunderbird or is it also reproducible in the Firefox version of the extension?

[gene-git]

Screen shot - sure - I don't have the firefox version.

[rugk]

/cc @tdulcet

[gene-git]

If I chenge TB color settings to
never override - then the preferences work fine.
However the preview pane in TB now has white background which is horrible for dark theme - so I need to set to override always for TB to be reasonably sane.

Can't say if this is TB bug or by design :) or if there's anything addon can do - but that what I see...

[gene-git]

Also, just in case this be helpful, I have 2 other addons and they both work fine (cardbook and dkim-verifier)

[rugk]

What do you mean with these overwrite settings? Do you have a support link or a screenshot of the setting, which causes the issue here?

[gene-git]

In thunderbird : settings -> language & appearence -> colors
In the popup window there is a drop down as shown here:

[rugk]

So some background that may help you to understand what is happening: Without overwrite it should honor prefers-color-scheme, i.e. your system/browser's design/theme, in dark it will have a dark background and light text and in light vice versa.

So when you overwrite that in your browser via some overwrite, that will of course fail, respectively Thunderbird must somehow honor that.
I am still not sure what exact combination of settings causes this. Does the OS theme also influence it? Does "use system colors" make a difference? What else other than "always override" can you select there? Etc. etc.

The other sections are legible but not brilliantly so (Details, Permissions and Release notes).

Also note that this is 100%ly rendered and handled by Thunderbird itself, and the extension only provides the content/text, but Thunderbird does all the rendering and design there. Only the settings itself can be influenced.

[gene-git]

Thanks for doing research / follow up. The option to use OS theme makes no difference - starting to seem like this may well be bug with TB - for sure without that 'override' setting there are parts of thundebird that do NOT respect dark theme which is why it was necessary.

Hey if you feel this is really all TB fault feel free to close this one out.

Its not critical, as one can always turn off the override - make whatever settings you want and then turn it back to keep TB usable.

[rugk]

Hey if you feel this is really all TB fault feel free to close this one out.

I'll wait for @tdulcet 's reply on that, he has more insight into Thunderbird.

Anyway, in the mean time, if you think this is a bug in Thunderbird you may open a bug report for them, respectively search for existing reports, also/or look into the support forum.

[gene-git]

cool thanks!

[tdulcet]

I'll wait for @tdulcet 's reply on that, he has more insight into Thunderbird.

A quick check shows that the options page in Thunderbird works as expected with the dark mode without this override:

Although I can confirm the issue when enabling the override:

However, enabling the same override in Firefox causes the same issue:

This override seems to enable the high contrast mode (see here and here) which it not yet well supported by Firefox/Thunderbird (see bug 1016556 and bug 1619744). Although, I checked the options pages for a few other add-ons in Firefox and most did not have this issue, so I would say it is likely a bug with the CSS used by the AutomaticSettings library (it probably needs to be checking prefers-contrast).

starting to seem like this may well be bug with TB - for sure without that 'override' setting there are parts of thundebird that do NOT respect dark theme which is why it was necessary.

Yeah, the fact you need to enable this override at all to make the dark mode work as expected in Thunderbird means that there must be other bugs in Thunderbird. I would encourage you to file bugs on BMO for those.

[gene-git]

Seems its a known bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1690531
@tdulcet give your detailed understanding how TB works, it would be helpful if you added your thoughts to the bugzilla?

thanks

[rugk]

Thanks for all the investigation. I've opened TinyWebEx/AutomaticSettings#23 for it. Also removed the Thunderbird tag as it thus also seems to affect Firefox.

[tdulcet]

@tdulcet give your detailed understanding how TB works, it would be helpful if you added your thoughts to the bugzilla?

My knowledge is just about TB extensions, since I ported this add-on and several others to TB, so unfortunately I do not think I would be much help with that bug... Hopefully they will be able to get it fixed for you.