On Windows, the default page background color is white (i.e. for an HTML page that does not specify a background color or image on the BODY tag, or through CSS). On Mac and UNIX, it's gray. Why the difference?

I guess it has something to do with widget/nsLookAndFeel.cpp on Mac and Unix: case eColor_WindowBackground: aColor = NS_RGB(0xdd,0xdd,0xdd); break;

Setting QA Contact/component

reassigning to sdagley as p4 for m13

why was this left on M13? moving to m15

*** Bug 26772 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Why does sdagley have this? Reassigning to pierre, since this is really a layout issue.

Assigning to ekrock: 1/3 of Pierre's NEW bugs to help reduce his doomage factor

Reassigned back to me these bugs that shouldn't have left my list.

On Windows the bkcolor is a system setting, as it is on gtk, qt and OS/2. The mac and BeOS implementations of nsLookAndFeel have hard-coded the values instead of getting the system values. (I did not look at the other platforms) This is either OK as is, or the platform implementations of nsLookAndFeel that have hard-coded colors need to be updated to reflect system colors. This should probably be somebody else's bug...

sfraser: The CSS2 System Colors are a related yet separate issue. It was assigned to sdagley because the platform-specific implementations of nsLookAndFeel belong to XPWidgets. Bouncing back to XPWidgets.

reassigning to rods, who I'm told has claimed this as his very own.

The nsLookAndFeel on the make needs to get the system color for the background of pages just like the other platforms

On Mac, there is no widely accepted background color for HTML pages in the system, which is probably the reason why the platforms differ. However, Internet Config has a setting for the page background color, as well as visitied and unvisited links, and I think we should start using these. davidm is in the process of adding Internet Config support, so there will be a service you can call to get info from IC.

This bug has been marked future because we have determined that it is not critical for netscape 6.0. If you feel this is an error, or if it blocks your work in some way -- please attach your concern to the bug for reconsideration.

this may seem like a silly suggestion, but why don't we simply modify html.css from this: body { display: block; line-height: normal; margin: 8px; } to this: body { display: block; line-height: normal; margin: 8px; background-color: white; /* ensures platform parity on background colors */ } In the future, we can add more platform specific stuff for a "more correct" solution. In the here and now, we're consistent across platforms. There is also a mozilla precident for this. The html.css frame background color is defined as being white. This solution would simply be doing the same thing for non-frame pages. Thoughts? David

This bug is not valid. We get the colour of the page background from the system, and thus fit with the user's preferences by default. You could take three Windows systems and we would have a different page background colour on each; it's not a per-platform thing it is a per-user thing. If you want the default background changed for a particular platform, file a bug directly on that platform. Mac and Xlib have a hard coded values, because (I guess) those platforms do not have user-editable preferences for colours (!). The proposed solution would not work due to clashing with CSS rules for background propagation (this is a complex issue, mail me if you want details). Also, the "mozilla precedent" was actually a bug causing performance problems, and you will see the frame background colours have now been set to transparent. In any case, that white was not being used as 'white' anywhere. (The colour was overriden by the document that was drawn on the frame itself.) FWIW, bug 1004 is covering the issue of implementing nsLookAndFeel correctly on the Mac.

Reopening because nobody knows where the gray background is coming from. I asked the following question to Don, Buster, Waterson, Kevin and others last month but nobidy replied. Ian is persuaded that it comes from the nsPresContext constructor but I wrote 3 times already that it does not. --- In html.css, when the viewport and viewport-scroll have "background-color: inherit", we get a gray background on the web pages - rgb(192,192,192) - but it doesn't come from nsLookAndFeel, nor StyleColorImpl::ResetFrom(), nor from nsPresContext::nsPresContext(). Do you know where that default background is set?

I should have added that when viewport and viewport-scroll don't have "background-color: inherit" (which isn't what we want) then the color comes from the LookAndFeel.

Bug 5721 is the general "support Internet Config properly" bug on the Mac. This can be considered to be a part of that bug, if you like.

boy howdy. this bug has been around the block. i know for a fact that this difference is causing certain pages to look crappy on mac when they look ok on win32. tables end up with a gray bg on mac, and on win32 they're white and so it looks a-ok. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71775

I think the color we give (hardcoded) in the Mac version of nsLookAndFeel.cpp, should be white for eColor_WindowBackground. I made this change (see Pierre's first comment for location) and haven't seen any problems in either theme.

brade, since you made the bg white, can you try http://www.headphone.com/ProductsHeadphones/SennheiserHD570.asp and see if the table bg is gray or white? On the tip, it's an ugly gray.

I'll take this bug and do the IC thing

Does IC default to #FFFFFF? Having a default other than #FFFFFF defeats the purpose of the setting because Web authors will keep overriding the user pref on a per page basis if the default is unacceptable to them. (Page authors, in general, don't want gray backgrounds. Defaulting to gray way back in Mosaic and Nav 1 was a bad idea.)

The default of Internet Config is irrelevant (but yes, it is white). The reason is that if the Preference for using the "OS Settings" is checked, this is what the OS has set (whether the user has that setting in IC to orange, red, blue, gray, or white). Henri--I don't understand your point. If the user sets the preference in the OS, we should be following it (not trying to guess what a page author may or may not have wanted it to appear with).

Patch looks good. My only reservation is the overhead of getting the IC service each time we request the page background or foreground color. Does anyone have opinions on this?

nsInternetConfigService::GetColor gets called 3 times for a new window open and once for each URL that is loaded. Unfortunately I don't have the instrumentation installed right now to determine how long it takes to call into IC on my Mac. If there is a performance problem, I think we should fix the problem of the nsPresContext constructor not calling into LookAndFeel when it may not need the information anyways (or some other related fix). Other opinions?

fix checked in