Eitan

3 weeks ago

Eitan
3 weeks ago

Yesterday I had the satisfaction of tearing out a 30 year old Netscape-era feature from #firefox and introducing something that should be more useful in the modern #web. Hang tight and I will give you a visual history...

Behold Netscape 4 from 1997 looking right back at you:

Screenshot of Netscape 4 on Windows 95 showing a 90s era yahoo.com.

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Eitan

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

It had a colors settings pane that looked like this

Screenshot of Netscape 4's preferences with the colors section open.

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Eitan

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

If you messed with it, you can skin* the web!

(*) "skin" is a forgotten verb from the 90s. I want to believe the etymology has something to do with Silence of the Lambs.

Screenshot of Netscape 4's preferences with the colors section open, the colors are changed to white on black, orange and yellow links. The main window in the background shows Yahoo.com with the altered colors.

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Eitan

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

Anyway, since two days ago, #firefox had the same dialog that has persisted in the browser for almost 30 years! What does it do? Nothing much. That is because the web today uses a technology called cascading style sheets. Websites are thoroughly themed through and through (or "skinned" if you prefer). Using a default foreground or background is almost unheard of...

#firefox

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Eitan

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

...except sometimes a ye olde web master will forget to define a color for their site's background and just assume that the browser's default color is white. Things then go sideways, if you messed with the default colors and tried to "skin" the web.

Screenshot of shopping for doorknobs at lowes.com. The text is black on black.

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

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Eitan

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

So, bottom line. The colors settings in #firefox is deceiving and useless to the modern user. Or is it really useless? I don't think so. If you use it correctly, it allows you to unleash the browser's powerful color contrast features that forces a specified foreground and background color on all web content.

#firefox

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Eitan

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

So the first step is to stop giving users false expectations with a settings name like "Colors". You can't change the default colors on the modern web, things just break. Instead we should have settings with an appropriate name. Introducing "Contrast Control"

Screenshot of Firefox "Contrast Control" settings. Description reads "Websites have a variety of foreground and background colors. Configure Nightly to use the same colors across websites for improved readability."

Radio group includes "Automatic (use system settings)", "Off", and "Custom".

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Eitan

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

You can read more about this new setting in my blog post.

blog.monotonous.org/2025/03/06…

New Contrast Control Settings | monotonous.org

What We Did In today’s nightly build of Firefox we introduced a simple three-state toggle for color contrast. It allows you to choose between these options: ...

^{blog.monotonous.org}

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Luke

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

ha I noticed this because I'd broken my firefox nightly into a state where it was skinning everything but didn't think it was and that was very broken 😅.

One suggestion, if this setting is specifically about forced-colors "Contrast" might be confusing as it doesn't let me request more contrast (prefers-contrast media query)?

Great to see Firefox experimenting here!

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Curtis Wilcox

in reply to Luke 3 weeks ago

@Lukew
BTW, Windows now calls the feature just "Contrast Themes." Users can make make their theme colors whatever they want and if the contrast between their Canvas and CanvasText colors are low enough, both `forced-colors: active` and `prefers-contrast: less` will be true.

It would be nice if custom colors in Firefox could do the same.

@Luke

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Eitan

in reply to Curtis Wilcox 3 weeks ago

@cwilcox808 @Lukew that's a good idea. I should open a bug for that

@Curtis Wilcox @Luke

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Anton 🇺🇦🇪🇺

in reply to Eitan 3 weeks ago

In most of the projects I work on, we actually leave the background color as-is specifically to allow for user customization. But it isn't super useful because we often have to change the text color, and then that might not be compatible with whatever background color the user chooses. I am hoping to see more features like contrast-color() land in browsers so we can define text color that will work for any user preference :)
w3.org/TR/css-color-5/#contras…