Imagine that every website in the world was designed in an ugly green on purple color scheme, like this one, and that everyone in the world loved green on purple, and you were the only person in the world that didn't, and in fact, you couldn't even imagine how anyone else could stand to look at it. Can you imagine how isolated that might feel? Then you have an idea of how I feel every day, trying to navigate an entire Internet designed on a white background.
There are many good reasons why we might want to set our own background and text color preferences to override those specified by the website. In my case it's due to sensitivity to bright light. A white background is unbearable; to me, it's like reading the wattage and other fine print on the top of a light bulb while the bulb is on. So I appreciate that the Firefox programmers set things up so I can set my browser to use more subdued colors. But there is a very serious problem with doing this.
Here are three screen captures of a helpful Firefox resource website. In this first capture we see the page as it looks normally, with no open menus and respecting the background and color settings specified by the website:
If you overlook my own preferred clunky monospace font, it's a nice looking page. Next, here's the same page with a dropdown menu opened to two levels: First, a mouseover of the "Mozilla" button, then a mouseover of the "Info Main" text:
Still quite nice looking. It's a well-designed site and a fantastic free resource, but I can't stand to look at it! Honestly. The brilliantly bright background is absolutely intolerable to my eyes. I would have to pass over this site if I could not override the color scheme. Thankfully, I can... but here's what happens when I do:
WOW! An unreadable mess. Everything goes transparent when I specify my own colors, yielding the page completely useless. And it's not just the menus. Note the words "FILE TESTS" at the very top of the screen. These words had scrolled out of sight in the first two examples, but in the one directly above, the top frame has also gone transparent.
And it's not just Mr. Mullen's page shown above, it's every page out there. Here's a screen capture from the popular domain registrar GoDaddy.com :
My online bank does the same thing. In fact, everywhere I go I get transparent dropdown menus, rendering the site useless, and if I need the information badly enough to go edit my preferences to allow the specified colors, I still can't read it due to the fact that the vast, VAST majority of websites force a white background and I can't look at them. So either way, most websites that are intended to be helpful or informative, and even those that are downright necessary, are off limits to me.
Firefox programmers... please address this issue! Make it so when I specify my own color scheme, everything doesn't go transparent. Make it so I can still use the same websites everyone else does.
