Mozilla OS Colors: Screenshots request.

[patrickjdempsey]

I've been doing some analysis of the results above and I have some rather interesting results:



My first shock was what Vista Aero and OSX Aqua report back the exact same colors for these colors despite having dramatically different color schemes. Also, according to these results the color "ThreeDLightShadow" is a *more accurate color* for the backgrounds of toolbox elements than "-moz-dialog". Even the strange outlier here, XP Silver is actually more accurate to the color of actual XP Silver toolbars which fade from tan to silver. But the real winners here are Vista/7 Aero and OSX, which both have nearly white colors reported for "-moz-dialog" while actual native toolbars are much darker.

Due to these results I've decided to use ThreeDLightShadow for #navigator-toolbox and the tabs. I did some tests with various Windows Classic schemes and there's problems with some of them, so I've used a media query to revert Windows Classic, and the various Luna themes back to -moz-dialog. If anyone using Linux could run this test in whatever desktop managers they have, I would greatly appreciate it.

[Axel Grude]

Patrick, you have to be careful when you are using the OS-specific shorthands, for instance you CANNOT assume that THreeDFace is always a bright(er than black) color, and then use a hardcoded dark color for the fonts. I am a long time windowblinds user and these values can be completely changed by the Theme the OS is using. What is worse, on some OS (Linux / Mac) only a part (or none) of these might be even defined.

For more predictable results I would recommend setting your own colors and not relying on the system colors provided by the Operating System.

kind regards,
Axel

[Axel Grude]

Patrick, you have to be careful when you are using the OS-specific shorthands, for instance you CANNOT assume that THreeDFace is always a bright(er than black) color, and then use a hardcoded dark color for the fonts. I am a long time windowblinds user and these values can be completely changed by the Theme the OS is using. What is worse, on some OS (Linux / Mac) only a part (or none) of these might be even defined.

For more predictable results I would recommend setting your own colors and not relying on the system colors provided by the Operating System.

kind regards,
Axel

Just to give you some background, among others, I am developing the QuickFolders plugin for the last couple of years, so I am actually talking from my own experience.

http://quickfolders.mozdev.org/screenshots.html

When I started to make the extension more configurable I also used the OS specific values but found out that these would often lead to unpredictable results. Also, you cannot pass them into the color picker dialog.

cheers
Axel

[patrickjdempsey]

No hard-coded text colors here, just the -moz-dialogtext color.

The way I would *prefer* to color the toolbars is to use -moz-dialog as a default and then use media queries to detect the specific Windows themes, OSX themes, or Linux window manager themes for better control. Unfortunately, Mozilla only supports detecting Windows themes using Media Queries (with OSX Graphite thrown in there just to frustrate those of us who want to detect both flavors of OSX). I could catch OSX using a chrome.manifest flag, and all the Windows environments using Media Queries, but that still leaves all of the Linux window manager environments wide open... being able to detect "Linux" doesn't really tell me anything. I did disable this effect for Windows Classic users (for which the color is the same anyway) due to my tests of a few of the high-contrast themes which it fails under. If I get any negative feedback from Linux users I'll probably go to that more complicated method, but I'm just seeing what happens for now.

If you have the free time to create some screenshots using the sample HTML of some of the Windows Blinds you use, I would really appreciate it. The more of this stuff we have documented the better.

[patrickjdempsey]

Also, I'm well aware of the limitations of the OS color palettes... for instance I know that you can't use the menuhover colors for menus in Linux, it just flat out fails so you have to use highlight. Also, years ago I used the threeddarkshadow for all dark lines in my themes, as this is what the default theme was using, but discovered that this color is completely black in Windows Classic, and a very light grey in OSX. For whatever reason, and maybe it's just a fluke, but on all the themes I've seen it, threedlightshadow seems to be exactly the color I want, being a tad darker than the normal "dialog" color.

What would be *ideal* would be if we simply had an OS color-pair that corresponded to the base color of toolbars and their text.