Vincent Reporter
	Description • 10 years ago

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140414143035

Steps to reproduce:

Open Firefox with tabs open, or open a new tab with an existing one open.


Actual results:

It became impossible to read the tab titles of the unfocused tabs, unless Firefox itself did not have focus.


Expected results:

Unfocused tabs should still be focused.

Things that might be relevant:
- Windows 8
- Firefox 29 beta (since starting testing it about two weeks ago)
- I've set a custom wallpaper.
- I've chosen a custom colour for my Windows theme.
- Anything else?

	:Gijs (he/him)
	Comment 1 • 10 years ago

(In reply to Vincent from comment #0)
> Created attachment 8408819 [details]
> Unreadable_tabs.png
> 
> User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101
> Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
> Build ID: 20140414143035
> 
> Steps to reproduce:
> 
> Open Firefox with tabs open, or open a new tab with an existing one open.
> 
> 
> Actual results:
> 
> It became impossible to read the tab titles of the unfocused tabs, unless
> Firefox itself did not have focus.
> 
> 
> Expected results:
> 
> Unfocused tabs should still be focused.
> 
> Things that might be relevant:
> - Windows 8
> - Firefox 29 beta (since starting testing it about two weeks ago)
> - I've set a custom wallpaper.
> - I've chosen a custom colour for my Windows theme.
> - Anything else?

Could you open the browser console and run:

Cu.import("resource:///modules/Windows8WindowFrameColor.jsm").get()

and tell us what that returns?

(note that if you don't see an input box in the browser console, you can open the 'regular' developer tools, go to the settings tab in them, and enable chrome debugging in the bottom right hand corner of the settings)

	:Gijs (he/him)
	Comment 2 • 10 years ago

(I just tried to reproduce this by setting the window frame to have a white color, but I still get black text - did you recently change the color, and have you tried if the problem goes away if you restart Firefox ?)

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 3 • 10 years ago

That returns:

    TypeError: Cu.import(...).get is not a function

Restarting Firefox does not work, and my colour settings have been this way since forever. I'm not sure how exactly I did it, but it appears my setting is a kind of grey.

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 4 • 10 years ago

Trying to guess what you meant with my limited knowledge, I ran:

 Cu.import("resource:///modules/Windows8WindowFrameColor.jsm").Windows8WindowFrameColor.get().toString()

This returned:

  84,84,84

	:Gijs (he/him)
	Comment 5 • 10 years ago

(In reply to Vincent from comment #4)
> Trying to guess what you meant with my limited knowledge, I ran:
> 
>  Cu.import("resource:///modules/Windows8WindowFrameColor.jsm").
> Windows8WindowFrameColor.get().toString()
> 
> This returned:
> 
>   84,84,84

Right... that's very strange. These are RGB values, and the registry value "ColorizationColor" at
 "Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\DWM", seems to be telling us that's the color in the titlebar (it's a kind of dark gray - not anywhere near the white in the screenshot). That's why we're making the text and icons white, so that they'd be legible against a dark grey, and it's why they're completely illegible against the actually visible white...

Can you post a screenshot of the color settings under "Personalization > Color and Appearance" in the Windows control panel, and/or check the value of that registry key (it's a single number which encodes all the colors and an alpha value) ? I wonder how we get a different number than what that registry value proclaims...

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 6 • 10 years ago

I've attached the screenshot. I'm not too familiar with Windows, but I think this is the value of the registry key (from under HKEY_CURRENT_USER): 0x85545454 (2236896340)

	Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)
	Comment 8 • 10 years ago

From my testing, I never saw the Alpha value having any impact on the window frame color. Converting the registry above does show that it should be rgba(84,84,84,133). I checked in Paint.net and that color is indeed quite grey on a white background as well as a transparent background.

	Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)
	Comment 9 • 10 years ago

Sorry for asking you to do this again, but can you take a screenshot of the Color and Appearance window again, but this time show the color mixer? As well, could you also include a screenshot of the regedit window when looking at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM ?

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 10 • 10 years ago

Sorry it took so long, this is at work. Screenshots are attached.

	Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)
	Comment 13 • 10 years ago

Thank you for the helpful screenshots. By changing the values of my registry to match yours, I was able to get the white text to show, however the window frame color did not change to white as it shows in your screenshots.

I did find this one blog post, http://www.windows8core.com/how-to-get-different-colors-for-taskbar-and-windows-borders-in-windows-8-rtm/, describing some registry changes that can be made to give your window frames a different color than the Windows taskbar.

Also, to note, my registry and yours had some different keys. In the following list, if it has a + in front, it means that my registry had this key and yours didn't. If it has a - then it means that my registry did not have this key and yours did.

+ ColorizationGlassAttribute 0x0
+ UseDPIScaling 0x1 (this should be only because I'm running on a HiDPI machine though)
- ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity 0x32
- ColorizationOpaqueBlend 0x0
- CompositionPolicy 0x0

Keys like 'ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity' are referenced in Windows7 articles about how to remove the shiny stripes from the taskbar. Did you upgrade this system from Windows7? Did you make these "registry tweaks" back when you were using Windows7?

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 14 • 10 years ago

I never edited any registry keys. Although the computer is not maintained by me, I do believe it was indeed upgraded from Windows 7.

	Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)
	Comment 15 • 10 years ago

Florin, do you think you could test upgrading a machine from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and seeing if you can reproduce this problem?

	[SV Manager] Florin Mezei, QA (:FlorinMezei)
	Comment 16 • 10 years ago

Jared, I've managed to reproduce this on a Win 8 x64 Ultrabook, with the latest 31 Nightly, 30 Aurora and 29 RC builds. All I did was go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM and set all entries to match those from attachment 8410072 [details] (comment 11)... this meant creating the missing ones, and deleting any extra ones. After a restart, sure enough the issue shows each time you have Firefox in focus with multiple tabs.

Registry entries differences were same as you reported:
+ ColorizationGlassAttribute 0x0
- ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity 0x32
- ColorizationOpaqueBlend 0x0
- CompositionPolicy 0x0

I'm not sure why there would be extra registry entries specific to Win 7, and missing Win 8 ones, but I would rather not upgrade to Win 8 unless really necessary, since I have multiple Operating Systems on my machine and it would take some effort to properly do that, then recover Win 7 again.

	Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)
	Comment 20 • 10 years ago

(In reply to Florin Mezei, QA [:FlorinMezei] from comment #16)
> I'm not sure why there would be extra registry entries specific to Win 7,
> and missing Win 8 ones, but I would rather not upgrade to Win 8 unless
> really necessary, since I have multiple Operating Systems on my machine and
> it would take some effort to properly do that, then recover Win 7 again.

Ok, thanks for your help. I will continue to investigate this.

	Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)
	Comment 21 • 10 years ago

Mike, can you take this? I tried again but still can't reproduce this.

However, once we can reproduce it, we still need to determine the likelihood that users will encounter this bug. If it only affects users that have manually adjusted their registry, then this bug is wontfix, but if this can be reached through some upgrade path or popular UI customization then we'll need to see what we can do here.

	Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]
	Comment 22 • 10 years ago

I'll check it out asap. Leaving n-i flag until I can reproduce it.

	Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]
	Comment 23 • 10 years ago

I'll check it out asap. Leaving n-i flag until I can reproduce it.

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 24 • 10 years ago

Is it OK if I mess with my registry values to work around this? Now that Firefox 29 has been released it's getting a bit annoying, so I'd like to fix it. If leaving it as-is can help with solving it/testing solutions, I'll put up with it a little longe though.

	:Gijs (he/him)
	Comment 25 • 10 years ago

(In reply to Vincent from comment #24)
> Is it OK if I mess with my registry values to work around this? Now that
> Firefox 29 has been released it's getting a bit annoying, so I'd like to fix
> it. If leaving it as-is can help with solving it/testing solutions, I'll put
> up with it a little longe though.

I think it's fine if you change some, because other people have also reported this issue, and I wouldn't want to penalize you for having reported the bug! :-)

I actually wonder which of the other ones would affect this problem, that is, reverting which of these:

(In reply to Florin Mezei, QA [:FlorinMezei] from comment #16)
> Registry entries differences were same as you reported:
> + ColorizationGlassAttribute 0x0
> - ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity 0x32
> - ColorizationOpaqueBlend 0x0
> - CompositionPolicy 0x0

change the titlebar color to the dark grey that the color in ColorizationColor represents. If you can check this and let us know, that'd be interesting. :-)

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 26 • 10 years ago

Weird - I just altered my registry values to those you mentioned above, and I still can't read the tab titles after logging out and back in. I'll attach a screenshot of the current values.

	:Gijs (he/him)
	Comment 28 • 10 years ago

(In reply to Vincent from comment #26)
> Weird - I just altered my registry values to those you mentioned above, and
> I still can't read the tab titles after logging out and back in. I'll attach
> a screenshot of the current values.

Did the color of your titlebars stay the same, ie white?

	:Gijs (he/him)
	Comment 29 • 10 years ago

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch (PTO april 28) from comment #28)
> (In reply to Vincent from comment #26)
> > Weird - I just altered my registry values to those you mentioned above, and
> > I still can't read the tab titles after logging out and back in. I'll attach
> > a screenshot of the current values.
> 
> Did the color of your titlebars stay the same, ie white?

Eh, I guess that's obvious from the screenshot... but that's odd. So something else is still affecting that color - but I don't know what. :-\

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 30 • 10 years ago

Yes, it's still the same. I could try whether manually changing the colour to something else works? Or would that interfere with other testing efforts?

	:Gijs (he/him)
	Comment 31 • 10 years ago

(In reply to Vincent from comment #30)
> Yes, it's still the same. I could try whether manually changing the colour
> to something else works? Or would that interfere with other testing efforts?

No, that sounds fine. Another thing you could try would be exporting the current state of this part of the registry and then removing all the *Old values, and seeing if that makes a difference... The final try would be restarting the machine (rather than "just" logging in and out), although considering it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER, I would have expected logging in and out to work...

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 32 • 10 years ago

Hmm, this is odd. Deleting the values did not do anything. However, opening the Color and Appearance window and sliding the Color intensity slider a bit, hardly changing its position, and clicking Cancel (i.e. not "Save changes"!) turned my window borders grey, and the tab titles readable. I'm not sure if anything meaningful has changed, but I attached the current state of regedit.exe

	Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]
	Comment 34 • 10 years ago

(In reply to Vincent from comment #32)
> Hmm, this is odd. Deleting the values did not do anything. However, opening
> the Color and Appearance window and sliding the Color intensity slider a
> bit, hardly changing its position, and clicking Cancel (i.e. not "Save
> changes"!) turned my window borders grey, and the tab titles readable. I'm
> not sure if anything meaningful has changed, but I attached the current
> state of regedit.exe

WAT? I'm glad you were able to get things to normal... I *think* you managed to trigger a bug in our compositor, but without any of us able to reproduce it remains guess-work, I'm afraid...

One last question, though, are you able to retrigger the bug when you put the registry values back as they were and perhaps fiddle with the color intensity slider again?

	Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)
	Comment 35 • 10 years ago

I've seen multiple complaints about this online, and I'm fearing that there is some upgrade path between Windows7 to Windows8 (likely not Windows8.1) that is causing this. We should see if we can get a fix for this uplifted to Firefox30 if possible.

	Vincent Reporter
	Comment 36 • 10 years ago

Mike, unfortunately, I haven't been able to retrigger it. All my registry values are as they were, but after signing in and out, the window border is still grey (i.e. the text is readable). Messing with the Color intensity slider after that did not do anything either, regardless of whether I saved the settings or pressed cancel again.

	Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)
	Comment 37 • 10 years ago

I'm duping this bug over to bug 1004576, which just had a patch land there. Unfortunately Gijs and I can't get windows with this white-ish titlebar when setting our registry this way, and the patch in bug 1004576 should fix the issue for users with white-ish titlebars anyways.