Deth

Fitness and everything else

Finally Fixed Firefox Showing White Form Controls With Dark Theme

Firefox is my browser of choice. The only other choice on FreeBSD is Chromium, and I don’t like its GUI and lack of customization ability, nor do I like how it handles ignoring website colors.

Being legally blind, I prefer white text on a black background. It’s just easier to read that way. I’ve been doing that since I was a kid, using a CCTV in school, where I learned that the negative contrast is just easier on my eyes.

It’s really helpful to me to be able to override a website’s styles to give me a nice high contrast white text on a black background so that I can comfortably read it. Not only is that helpful, but the current design fashion of poor contrast would add another challenge for me.

Luckily, Firefox allows you to set it up so that pages use your colors rather than their own, and this has worked great for me for years. Recently though, something had changed in Firefox and while it would take my colors for the text most controls (text boxes buttons and drop-downs) would be a bright white background with black text. Not useful at all, and I tried tweaking different settings and for a while couldn’t find the proper combination.

I tried again today and finally got it to use my preferred colors by setting widget.non-native-theme.enabled set to false in about:config. I could have sworn I’ve tried that before, and it didn’t help, but it did now. Who knows? Hopefully, that works for a while, but with the way, they randomly like to change the UI, I don’t have much hope at all for it to last. As Mozilla seems to be taking away customization ability just like Google does but at a much slower rate, I don’t anticipate it will last long.