Three appearance themes potentially defunct on macOS

[ScriptHippie]

In the Appearance setting of "Bling My Tabs!", the three themes "Native Tabs, "Pushbutton", and "Toolbar Buttons" all look the same. This is on macos 15.7.3, so maybe these themes are meant for Windows or Linux?

Not a big deal since I use "Apple Pills" usually, but it might be a bug.

Appearance under "Native Tabs" (with custom background color):

QuickFolders 6.14.2 (6.14.3pre14)

[RealRaven2000]

Warning: deep rabbit hole ahead.

Native Tabs just uses the "built in" look via a css appearance layout attribute.

/* NATIVE TABS */
.quickfolders-realTabs toolbarbutton
{
	appearance: tab;
}

I think they long ago stopped using it and they may have silently removed what it did. I certainly wouldn't be able to test it on Mac, but I can do some regression testing in older versions of Thunderbird. I suspect it may already have ended working properly on Thunderbird 114.

In older versions this used to be vendor prefixed:
-moz-appearance: tab;

Firefox prefixes a new one from v91: -moz-default-appearance: tab;
they actually replicate the rule in platform specific versions of their tabbox.css which is contained in toolkit, so this is shared with Thunderbird. However they completely removed the rules in Firefox 140. Here is the last instance in firefox-esr128 codebase oin searchfox.org:

https://searchfox.org/firefox-esr128/source/toolkit/themes/windows/global/tabbox.css#25

What do they replace it with? The file was completely removed in Fx140. I also believe they now have individual look + feel rule across their apps (Firefox tabs look very different from Thunderbird tabs). If I wanted to replicate that behavior (and change the author description to "your mail app" instead of "your OS") I would have to look into the individual rules in a thunderbird tab, that cause their behavior:

I don't think I could tab into the actual rules (which would obviously be the best solution as I wouldn't need to copy rules into the QF layout and make OS specific rule sets and the headache of maintaining them across the regular changes of the UI) - but that would mean completely rewriting the structure of my QuickFOlders tabs.

they got this structure (pseudo code including css class selector)

<tab .tab-stack> 
  <stack .tab-content>
      <html:img .tab-icon-image>
      </html:img>
      <hbox .tab-text .tab-label> 
          <label .tab-text .tab-label>
       </hbox>
  </stack>
</tab>

You can already see that they still use an unholy mixture of XUL and HTML entities (html:img is necessary to style a standard img HTML tag in this context)

Thunderbird seem to store their layout rules in the OS specific files tabmail.css, e.g. for Apple, in the osx subfolder:

Tb 128: https://searchfox.org/comm-esr128/source/mail/themes/osx/mail/tabmail.css#7
Tb current: https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/mail/themes/osx/mail/tabmail.css#7

(unfortunately there is no repo for Tb 140, it just jumps right to comm-central which is the latest version)

I could try to create my own look that rebuils what THunderbird shows, but it would have to be

• version specific - so we need different rule sets for Tb115, Tb128, Tb140 etc.
• OS specific - different rules for Windows, Linux, Mac

not sure that it's worth it. maybe the option should be dropped altogether.

[RealRaven2000]

One alternative would be replacing it with a new Theme "Tb140+" copying a subset of rules from the current look in Windows 10 - this one is a screenshot from the current beta, Thunderbird 148.0b4:

Have a look at the tabs of Thunderbird itself.

• rounded tab corners at the top (already supported by my flat style including customizable border radius)
• transparent buttons (also an option in flat style)
• opaque background and animated overbar with color accent for the selected / hovered tab

However my tabs are multi-row so I would have to think on what to do with the bottom bar, probably have the same color as the accent overstroke in the active tab. Basically we also already have an overstroke with the "striped style" so it could be just a mix-& match with some hardcoded rules from the classic tabs, but without filling the active tab:

an interesting thought: if a colored tab has its own color defined (e.g. the Tab SmartTemplates in the example above) we might potentially recolor the bottom bar of the QuickFolders bar to that color, additionally to making the tab opaque that might actually make a lot more sense for navigation?

[RealRaven2000]

an interesting thought: if a colored tab has its own color defined (e.g. the Tab SmartTemplates in the example above) we might potentially recolor the bottom bar of the QuickFolders bar to that color, additionally to making the tab opaque that might actually make a lot more sense for navigation?

just throwing around some ideas with chatGPT at the moment, the more I think about this it would make a ton of sense for the the underbar of QF settings to follow custom colors of the selected tab - regardless of whether in striped / filled style. it could just use the gradient rule of the currently selected tab if that had a custom color (from a palette only). I might just add this as an additional option to flat style first. This could be a starting point for a "Tb140" theme that replaces "Native Tabs"

[RealRaven2000]

everything we said about "Native Tabs" also applies to Pushbuttons / toolbarbuttons and it's not restricted to Mac alone - they all come across as the same on all Operating Systems. So for them to make any sense I need to come up with some layout rules, which I am just going to base on the current look in Thunderbird 147 at the current moment.

[RealRaven2000]

Here is a first attempt at diversifying our themes again, I tried to fix the theme "Pushbuttons" with a minimal layout, this is proof of concept:

QuickFolders-mx-6.14.3pre23.zip

Looks like this in Thunderbird 115:

And like this in beta 148:

The actual colors (text and background) for the selected folder tab are retrieved from the system values
--button-primary-text-color and --button-primary-background-color - which in the latest versions of Tb take the focus color from Windows itself (it's green on my system). Would be interesting to see what Mac OS makes of this one.

these are the initial values. the tab icon ones can we overwritten by the users, so all that logic is implemented in QuickFolders.Interface.updateUserStyles.

:root {
  --qf-tabiconsize: 16px;
  --qf-treeiconsize: 16px;
  --qf-primary-background-color: #006EB7;
  --qf-primary-text-color: white;
}

---

To install version above download zip file and drag the file into Thunderbird Add-ons Manager (do not extract contents, it won't install like that). You almost certainly should restart as style sheets are cached aggressively by Mozilla apps.

[RealRaven2000]

At this all day. I also implemented the "native tabs" for the moment, I probably need to test that one more with dark themes though:

QuickFolders-mx-6.14.3pre44.zip

This one shows the colored striped for custom colored tabs, otherwise a safe fallback derived from text copor.

---

To install version above download zip file and drag the file into Thunderbird Add-ons Manager (do not extract contents, it won't install like that). You almost certainly should restart as style sheets are cached aggressively by Mozilla apps.

[ScriptHippie]

Wow, so much work went into this. Thanks much.

A caveat / tip: Do verify if any of the appearance themes work as expected with the "Tab Content" config in general settings. I did find, f.e., that "Apple Pills" does not react to "Display with unread messages in bold", likely because that font style is already bold to begin with. Maybe that theme should not be bold by default, but it is hard to say or judge, since the preset does look good generally.

[RealRaven2000]

the more I think about this it would make a ton of sense for the the underbar of QF settings to follow custom colors of the selected tab - regardless of whether in striped / filled style. it could just use the gradient rule of the currently selected tab if that had a custom color (from a palette only). I might just add this as an additional option to flat style first. This could be a starting point for a "Tb140" theme that replaces "Native Tabs"

@ScriptHippie : if you like to test drive this, I implemented this today. Only works in flat style, but it makes a ton of sense. Should have done this behavior from the start! Its most obvious with the "Standard Palette" and "Pastel Colors", with Night mode I might change the behavior a bit for the black tabs - might nick the colored text as focus color for the bottom bar.

Test version is here:

#646 (comment)

[RealRaven2000]

Added 2 improvements:

• Improve selecting / changing QuickFolders themes by removing overwritten layout rules #650 this will now remove old rules when another theme is selected
• for colored tabs use the "plastic" color for the top striped in the "Native Tabs" theme:
  

QuickFolders-mx-6.15pre124.zip

---

To install version above download zip file and drag the file into Thunderbird Add-ons Manager (do not extract contents, it won't install like that). You almost certainly should restart as style sheets are cached aggressively by Mozilla apps.