George: my point was not about users selecting black text and black
background. My point was that the only way to respect the user’s choice
of colors is disabling background images altogether.

And disabling background images will make some elements disappear
because they have been coded as background images when they shouldn’t
have been. (And it’s a bad practice that is, alas, VERY common in web
pages — see Bug 1008583 for an example of this bad practice in Firefox
itself.)

Let me explain how text and backgrounds are painted over a page or an
area of a page. They are painted in three layers, from the top to the
bottom:

1. Text and content images
2. Background image
3. Background color

If they are present, background images (which can be repeated as a
pattern and cover a full page or area of a page) will be painted on top
of the background color, hiding that background color.

Let's say a user defines their preferred color as text=black, background=white. 
Pretty straightforward.
Now let’s say a website defines colors like this for the main content of their 
pages:

1. Text = #A0A0A0 (a light gray)
2. Black or dark background image (e.g. http://subtlepatterns.com/txture/)
3. Background color = #101010 (almost black)

If we change the text and background color to the user’s preference, BUT
keep the background image, we end up with:

1. Text = black
2. Black or dark background image
3. Background color = white

So we end up showing black text on a blackish background (the background
image, which completely covers the background color). The white
background color is not visible, and the text can’t be read.

Of course if the user chooses white text (and a black or dark
background) it works in this case, but it will break on many other
sites. Background images uses for decorative patterns, gradients and
other effects are very common on the Web (though a bit less popular in
webdesign in the past 2 years).

So Firefox has to disable background images for this feature (“Use my
own colors”) to work. BUT bad web developers use background images when
they shouldn’t (because in some cases it’s easier to do, and it even has
some benefits for making websites speedier). So disabling background
images makes some websites hard to use (e.g. disappearing buttons).

This can’t be fixed with a simple tweak of this feature. And it might
not be possible to find a more elaborate solution (read: days or even
weeks of developer time) that yields good results.

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You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to firefox in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/27867

Title:
  Background color is always white, top banner is never displayed in
  Firefox

Status in The Mozilla Firefox Browser:
  Confirmed
Status in “firefox” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Problem shows whatever the version of Epiphany (before and after today's 
upodate
  ie).

  Whatever the website I visit, the background colour is always white, and the
  logo/banner at the top of the page, is not displayed.

  I attached an example, showing Ubuntu bugzilla. No Ubuntu logo at the top, and
  no yellow background.

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121118:
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121118

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