On Mac I am not aware of themes per se, but there are accessibility options that have similar effects.
Again, what is your specific proposed solution? Stop using the current theme entirely when painting controls? You can sort of test what that looks like by putting "-moz-appearance: none" on some controls; then tell me whether that's what people using a non-dark GTK theme actually want. Or do you have some other concrete proposal?
And those are only the proposals that are linked from the original 18-year old bug, there are probably dozens of others that were opened independently.
Granted, some of them are dumb (the patch that hard-codes "Adwaita-dark" as a trigger seems particularly bad) but there is no excuse for this to still be around, 18 years later, despite all of the proposals and patches that have been sent to fix it. There are multiple firefox extensions out there that fix the bug, and they are very popular, with thousands of users each. In what crazy world is it considered good design practice to force thousands of your users to install 3rd party extensions to be able to read text on the internet?
Like the comment says: it makes things better with some themes but worse with others. Incidentally, the author of that patch is a senior engineer at Mozilla now; if he actually thought this patch made things better, it would be in the tree.
Note, by the way, that this bug report is about the Firefox UI itself, not about web pages.
Amusingly enough, that comment was written by me. There's nothing wrong with it. It's from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437366 which was a superficially similar, but not at all the same issue, and which I fixed back in 2009. (And yes, I have thought about this problem space quite a bit in the past, though not necessarily the Linux-specific bits.)
This one is actually useful, thank you. Following the links from there lands me at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283086#c13 from one of the RedHat folks who have been active in this stuff. Note that this comment says that Firefox tries to avoid using dark themes for form controls, but some dark themes fail to properly flag themselves as dark themes. Which makes it hard to avoid them.
Karl is an engineer on Firefox, working on GTK integration. If he felt that his comment were the right fix, it would be in the tree.
> In what crazy world is it considered good design practice to force thousands of your users to install 3rd party extensions to be able to read text on the internet?
In a world where all the proposals for fixing that so far make millions of users unhappy?
They exist just fine on Windows. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13768/desktop-theme... for example, and there's a number of themes that ship with Windows by default, including several "dark" themes.
On Mac I am not aware of themes per se, but there are accessibility options that have similar effects.
Again, what is your specific proposed solution? Stop using the current theme entirely when painting controls? You can sort of test what that looks like by putting "-moz-appearance: none" on some controls; then tell me whether that's what people using a non-dark GTK theme actually want. Or do you have some other concrete proposal?