White font on Mac in Thunderbird 91.3.1 - default theme

[RealRaven2000]

Bug report by a Mac user

"Thunderbird: 91.3.1 Max OS 10.15.7

My folders all have a color when I select them, but the color fades to white after a few seconds and I can only read the current folder name. New colour assigning didn’t help either.

I use the preset system theme from Thunderbird. So it shouldn't be that."

[RealRaven2000]

Since I do not own a Mac device I would need another user to check with the default (dark?) theme to check on theirs - using the Inspector tool. This can be found on the tools mewnu tools / developer tools / developer toolbox

click the element picker

click on a white labeled tab expand the button on the left hand side to get to the label:

click the "COmputed Styles" tab and expand the "color" attribute:

take a screenshot of all rules here

[RealRaven2000]

It also may be necessary to "include browser styles":

[RealRaven2000]

I have checked this yesterday with Arndt Dissler's help on his Mac, there are a couple of issues.

1 - the color pickers don't work on Mac! On @jobisoft 's suggestion had specifically converted from the old XUL color pickers to the HTML compatible <input type="color"> when we converted the Add-ons for Thunderbird 78 - it turns out they do not like to work within a (xul bnased) xhtml document such as the QuickFolders Preferences Dialog on Mac. The only solution for me at the moment is to return to the legacy pickers until they are (if they not already are) removed from the Mozilla code base and cease to function altogether. The long term solution is to convert the complete dialog into HTML5 - which is going to be tricky but not impossible so I hope.

2 - the default button (bottom right) doesn't return useful values when you use the "2 color" mode

3 - workaround: choose a palette for uncolored tabs (instead of 2 colors mode) and select a suitable entry from the dropdown:

the background and text color will be overwritten by what is selected there. If you are lucky the matching color choices for text+background may remain once you switch back to 2-color mode:

[RealRaven2000]

PS: make sure you select "filled style" on the bottom:

[MJWinckler]

I have to say I really do not know what I am exactly doing in this inspector mode. I have been a programmer once, but this was some time ago ...

This first Screenshot shows (apparently) that the background is set to the 3D-effect of a blueish tab. But there is also a background color set to white.

Here is the respective screenshot of the color section.

[RealRaven2000]

thanks! It looks like the styling really comes from QuickFolders itself, so what we need to do is fix the color pickers and make sure the "Default Colors" button doesn generate nonsense on Mac.

[RealRaven2000]

We are still working on a fix for the now defunct color pickers in Mac systems. Apparently we need to completely convert our options dialogs from xhtml (XUL) to html - this work is going to take a few weeks to complete but we are on it in this new branch:

https://github.com/RealRaven2000/QuickFolders/tree/ESR91-options-html

Luckily I am getting help from @jobisoft !

[RealRaven2000]

@MJWinckler - could you please try the latest build that uses HTML for options. It should allow you to set the colors on Mac.

QuickFolders-mx-5.9pre56.zip

I am almost complete with the conversion (except for the backup / restore options)

To install, download the zip file and then drag it into Thunderbird Add-ons Manager.

[MJWinckler]

Problem is: I am not continuously following your thread or the latest changes. I just updated Quickfolder to the suggested build and apparently it seems not to work:

• The extension manager says that the add-on was successfully installed. It shows version number 5.9pre56.

• BUT: Quickfolder is now nowhere to be seen. Not the extra menu in the folders, not the tab line above the mail/folder window.

  While I#m not a quickfolder expert, I usually get my software installed and running. I don't know what went wrong but it seems that the extension is not working. (Thunderbird version installed: 91.7.0).

[MJWinckler]

I just realized that this is not the current thunderbird version, so I upgraded to 91.8.0.

Result:

• Thunderbird somehow switched back to quickfolder 5.9.1
• Color (of course) is not working

[MJWinckler]

After re-installing Quickfolder 5.9pre56 (by unpacking the zip, taking the resulting folder and dropping it into thunderbirds add-on manager), the add-on manager shows 5.9pre56 and quickfolder is not working.

Remark: Maybe there is a conflict with the ("hidden") older version? Apparently (see last comment) this older version is still somewhere in the system and the two might not go along well together.

Remark: The add-on manager does not show the quickfolder icon in the list of extensions. The relevant square is black.

Remark: I currently have only one other extension installed (Filelink provider for large files with Dropbox)

[RealRaven2000]

After re-installing Quickfolder 5.9pre56 (by unpacking the zip, taking the resulting folder and dropping it into thunderbirds add-on manager), the add-on manager shows 5.9pre56 and quickfolder is not working.

5.9.1 has just been released, just allow the auto-update (5.9.1 is > than 5.9preXXX). You can then use the color pickers on Mac hopefully. If it doesn't install, remove and force reinstall it should work.

Remark: Maybe there is a conflict with the ("hidden") older version? Apparently (see last comment) this older version is still somewhere in the system and the two might not go along well together.

they are the same Add-on Id so you cannot load 2 versions at the same time. Also settings haven't changed.

Remark: The add-on manager does not show the quickfolder icon in the list of extensions. The relevant square is black.

if you right-click and select reload you can make an error log:

In Thunderbird main menu open Tools / Developer Tools / Error console (there is probably a keyboard shortcut but I only know the Windows / Linux one, Ctrl+Shift+J). If you reset the contents before you hit reload you may see some errors?

[RealRaven2000]

If you can open the QuickFolders settings dialog can you try what happens when you click on the color picker for text:

[MJWinckler]

Ok - I installed the latest version - and quickfolder is correctly installed.

However, the color problem persists.

I tried:

• recoloring every tab (using: right-click on tab -> QuickFolder commands -> TabColor -deleting all tabs and refilling the tab line after it was empty
• also giving every tab a tab category (I created my own category) - just in case an empty tab category might have unwanted results when the tab is colored.

[MJWinckler]

I went to the menu "Bling my tabs" and played around with the settings. Going to "two colors" for uncolored tabs gave me at least the writing (in black) on a white background and the standard colors for the "active tab" and "hovering over"

Then I changed the palette for colored tabs to "pastel" and recolored all my tabs. THIS finally gave me colors to all tabs.

I switched back to the standard palette and the coloring was persistent (in the standard scheme).

[RealRaven2000]

Yes If you use a palette for "uncolored Tab" you can then select one of the entries to set the standard palette entry for all tabs that do not have a specific color (palette entry) set, by clicking the "uncolored Tab" preview button:

switching from palette to 2 color can sometimes be a problem in the session as gradient backgrounds will overwrite plain background-color settings and removing rules from the session is sometimes tricky.

Btw, if you want to quickly remove individual colors from a bunch of tabs, you can use the tools menu with "paint mode":

You then select "Default color": and can quickly remove individual color settings by clicking any tab.

[RealRaven2000]

I went to the menu "Bling my tabs" and played around with the settings. Going to "two colors" for uncolored tabs gave me at least the writing (in black) on a white background and the standard colors for the "active tab" and "hovering over"

@MJWinckler : Did you ever try to select another font color using the color pickers? I believe there was a problem with invoking color pickers in the xhtml (xul) version of the settings dialog on Mac but that should be resolved now as I had converted the dialog to html.