ff 3.5 beta pink highlight text?? :S

[LoudNoise]

Rexel, don't use the program if you don't like it. We have been down this path before.

[Bluefang]

Personally I like it. It generally stands out on the page much better than the previous color (yellow IIRC).

[Rexel]

well it all should be made more easily customizable.. sorry but i'm not colorblind! I don't need some devs crap choices of colors picking for me.

[LoudNoise]

File an enhancement bug then. However, stop using your posts to issue insults simply because you don't like something.

[patrickjdempsey]

its rubbish, but thats what i've come to expect from firefox

LOL, I posted two logical reasons for the change and the only reason I can see to dislike it so strongly is an aversion to pink. It's not like you stumbled into the Barbie isle at Toys-R-Us. I can think off the top of my head a dozen things I dislike about FF3.0+ in general, and pink highlights isn't on that list, and it's actually on the list of positive changes. But hey, to each their own!

[graememcc]

FWIW, and at the risk of getting flamed into oblivion, I wrote the patch that made this change.

It's a consqeuence of the fundamental rewrite of the way findbar highlighting takes place (FX3 and earlier, it injected some additional HTML into the page to make the yellow highlight, which could break pages, was way to slow when you had a reasonable number of matches) and was impossible to get rid of.

The highlighting is now written as a selection. But the selection painting code contains code to aid accessibility and ensure selection backgrounds have enough contrast from the page background, and will sometimes flip the background and foreground colours. (You may have seen this in action when selecting areas of the page with the mouse on certain backgrounds). And the old colour scheme ran into this quite often - so the highlight was yellow text on a black background more often than the other way about. So the existing colours had to go.

I had a number of constraints to work with: different platforms have different thresholds for this "flipping", and I wanted something that would be relatively consistent across Win, Mac and Linux. I wanted to ensure the flip would not take place on pages with a white background (which was happening with a yellow highlight). The highlight had to be sufficiently different from the mouse selection, the attention selection (used when highlight is off to show the next match) and not be a colour with a meaning (eg red=warning). This didn't leave me a lot to play with, believe me.

You can read the whole sorry affair in bug 451204, where there's an attachment showing the range of possible colours.

I know it's a jarring change for many, but it allows us to highlight the "right" way, rather than messing up the content of the webpage. Additionally, you now need a large number of matches for highlighting to lock up the browser - a hundred or so would be enough before. It fixes the bug where you couldn't edit anything that's highlighted in a text input (though you can't yet see the caret, but that's another problem). It will allow me to fix in 3.6 the bug where you can't get rid of highlighting when you've changed tab and go back to the tab with highlighting. And it makes enhancement requests such as the automatic highlighting of all matches feasible now that it's faster.

more of these text selection color options need to be added to the userprefs .. I know of the ui.textselect_background,foreground, etc.. but there isn't enough.. and those don't always take effect in all places either..

needs to be more default control over text selections, highlighting for find in page etc

well it all should be made more easily customizable.. sorry but i'm not colorblind! I don't need some devs crap choices of colors picking for me.

Another benefit of the rewrite is that you do have that control:
ui.textHighlightBackground
ui.textHighlightForeground

For changing the default colour, constructive feedback in bug 451204 is welcome!

It also seems bugged; if you close the ctrl+f dialog the highlight all part remains highlighted.

That's bug bug 340814

It is pretty hard to get it away again. But this bug might be fixed in a build after the beta 4 I am using.

If you haven't changed tabs, or navigated to a new page and went back, then reopen the find bar and click the highlight button again.
Otherwise, you're talking about bug 279022 which I described above, and will now be able to fix.

[LoudNoise]

graememcc--
Thanks for stopping by.

[El Pino]

Cool that you came by to explain this graememcc. Considering this I think it is a good improvement. Especially so since it is easy to change the colours for those that dislike them.

When using Google's Chrome last week, I noticed their search function showed how many results there were and which result you were looking at (3 of 5) or something. I hope this can be added, since it was quite useful (you have an indication if you used a right search term, because it will take lots of ctrl+g's if there is 50 results).

[Rexel]

"Anor benefit of rewrite is that do have that control:
ui.textHighlightBackground
ui.textHighlightForeground"

..that is what I needed to know about.

but now the problem is still that I don't have control over the swap..I'm happy enough with below listed values for FF ui controls... and on most light background sites.. the problem is that I still have no control over the what colors are used when FF decides to reverse the bg attention color for a dark background colored website.. aswel as the rest of the colors etc.. and so for the currently highlighted active find selection I'll get red text on a white bg.. that's crap.. and not what I want at all.... I could live with the black bg+white text for light colored websites.. and white bg+black text on dark colored website.. but when the FF decides to reverse ui.textSelectBackgroundAttention;#F00 which makes the active find stand out ie red bg+white text.. doing the opposite of white bg+red text.. doesn't stand out and the red is harder to read. where is the control

ui.textHighlightBackground;#444
ui.textHighlightForeground;#FFF
ui.textSelectBackground;#444
ui.textSelectForeground;#FFF
ui.textSelectBackgroundAttention;#F00

its all or nothing doing this because you're just allowing a bit of customization and its not good enough.

Anyway generally I think Xul|Migemo does a handy job of chucking css into the mix allowing for better control... but its got its own array bugs and is in a much needed update fixing its bugs and making it easier to sort out its color scheme from its options instead of having to dig deep just to try and get some control over its default css settings too match up with the default FF findbar text selections etc... still its much better than default FF findbar -tis lame

"When using Google's Chrome last week, I noticed their search function showed how many results there were and which result you were looking at (3 of 5) or something"

well the FF findbar could do with a hell of lot more improvements. inlcuding mousewheel up/down highlighting of active search! but we all know FF doesn't seem to GET mousewheel support! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490229

[LoudNoise]

Is there a point to the maxthon link? If not. remove it.

[Rexel]

Is there a point to you moderators? you do nothing but get in the way with your pointless moderating and useless posts like that one above!

and yes the link stands as a shiny example as to the how a findbar should provide the user with useful features and customization -its just an addon. You remove it if you feel the firefox find bar is adequate, and feel the need to show off your shallow mindset!

[LoudNoise]

Removed.

[James]

Rexel, about your bugzilla comments see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html if you care about bugs getting fixed. I know Koogle is you.

[Frank Lion]

But this bug might be fixed in a build after the beta 4 I am using.

I wouldn't bank on it, the Highlight All is not colouring anything on the version I'm on.

I dare say it will be fixed in due course, no need for people to reach for their inhalers, this is the nature of using beta testing builds.

Hmm, this highlighting is working for me now, must be updating versions or something. Probably yellow would have been a better default colour choice, if only because that's what people expect, but I don't see this as a 'Oh noes, the sky is falling!' type moment.

Btw that colour is a fraction off magenta, not pink.

[TheLudovicoCenter]

I've got news for you Frank, the sky may not be falling but this sure isn't a good thing. This doesn't look good on Firefox. That fact is demonstrated even by the apparent 'culprit' who helped write that change (when he came to this very thread and started his post by a comment that he might risk "getting flamed" by exposing himself here. Meaning he knew he was up to no good when he picked, out of what?250+plus choices that are available, the color purple. And don't give me the argument that this pinkish-purple somehow possesses unique qualities that made this change necessary. I think what happened was that once it was decided that yellow was inadequate as a result of the internal changes to firefox 3.5, somebody saw this as an opportunity to sneak purple in (knowing full well that it will cause controversy).

This purple highlight issue may appear to be a relatively little matter (certainly to programmers and experts and wannabes/geeks) but it does really matter: Yellow is the default highlight color and that's not without reason. You don't see outdoor/street activities done by people wearing purple/turquoise/magenta-reflecting overalls. The almost universal color you see is yellow (which by the way is not a single color but a range with various tints like dark gold for example. And if, as the developer implied all the various yellow colors were inadequate for the new internal mechanism of Firefox 3.5, then there are other colors that are also commonly used from yellowish-orange all the way to lemon-ish green.

So the point is to remember that first impression is a very important thing. And the "find" function is a rather common browser feature that stands out. And so making it purple actually makes Firefox look bad IMHO. And making a bad first-impression is something that Firefox can't afford, certainly now when Google's Chrome is breathing heavily on it's rear-neck aiming to knock Firefox off 2n place (just like it knocked Opera out of the 3rd place as the most popular browser)