Sometimes you literally can't see the focus, in the case of an unselected list item, where we have no style rule for a focus outline. Other times it's just too faint to really notice.

The patch was checked in. I think that the 2px outline is a bit over-the-top. Maybe it should be set back to 1px, but leave the color as it is now (darker than that yellow one)? I'd like to CC Kevin to and hear his opinion.

This patch causes the favicons in bookmarks to be croped.

What on earth? Now the focus reticle in Firefox looks clunky, and is completely different to every other application on my system.

I also think its way overboard. At the most make it an option (off by default) in the accessibility options, because no other application does that, ever.

Someone else on IRC complained about the 2px thickness of the outline. Rather than get a lot of complaints, I think we should try to get an appearance that is visible enough but looks okay before we fix. It doesn't have to do exactly what the OS does, because honestly some 1px lightly colored dotted focus outlines are just too hard to see. We could either go 1px and dashed, at least for the selected focused appearance, or we could just turn on the loud focus outlines after someone hits ctrl+arrow or shift+arrow, so that in the normal case you just see things as they used to appear.

Would it be possible to leave the border 1px dotted, but change its color to the tree/list text color when focus leaves the selected element? That way the focus reticle is at least as discernable as the text, and people who use non-standard Firefox/Windows themes would have less of a problem if the background color on tree/list items is different.

I'm open to other attempts at style rules. You can see from the original patch how to modify things. Anyone want to play around and make it more attractive yet visible enough, please go ahead, otherwise I'll probably get to it after the beta.

We shouldn't have this border for the beta. It's fine for nightlies but we're going to get a lot of flak for the chunky selection outline for an announced beta.

Here's my attempt, 1px dashed is more visable then 1px dotted but not as chunky as 2px dotted.

(In reply to comment #6) > We could either go 1px and dashed, at least for the selected focused appearance, > or we could just turn on the loud focus outlines after someone hits ctrl+arrow > or shift+arrow, so that in the normal case you just see things as they used to > appear. Sorry I see you've already suggested that. Either of those seems good to me.

*** Bug 305350 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Is this bug still on the radar for beta? It has a checkin that not many approve of, but it's not marked fixed, and it has no blocking flag. Is the checkin (that nobody likes) going to remain for beta or will it be backed out/reworked?

Using non system colors isn't a good solution. IMO ThreeDDarkShadow is a good solution for outline-color. I can the such a color in other applications. Additionally I agree to use a 1px outline. 2px is really too much and doesn't look good. As style we should use dotted and not dashed.

I'm, as usual, speaking only from Windows experience. Why are we deviating from how things look in common Windows controls, or trying to add non-standard behaviors like changing the outline on Ctrl+Arrow?

It seems very unpopular so I guess we should just back it out. The reason we put deviated? I have 20/20 vision myself and I just can't see the old focus outline unless I'm squinting. A lot of people just can't see it. But go ahead and back it out. We'll come up with a better solution to the problem later. Right now I'm dealing with some hairy focus regressions and don't have time to help back this out.

I tried the following in userchrome.css and it produced the attached results. I tested on the last official release (1.0.6), since it suffered from this bug too and doesn't have the current patch applied like the nightlies do. treechildren::-moz-tree-row(current, focus) { border: 1px dotted -moz-FieldText !important; } treechildren::-moz-tree-row(selected, current, focus) { border: 1px dotted #c0c0c0 !important; listbox:focus > listitem[selected="false"][current="true"] { border: 1px dotted -moz-FieldText !important; } I'm not sure if -moz-FieldText is the right entity to use, but if we want the focus ring to be the same color as the text it'll work. Also, I used a gray color "c0c0c0" for the selected with focus for simplicity, but we'd also want a named entity there too, like "Highlight" maybe? Of course, we wouldn't want the "!important"s in there as well. This shouldn't be too hard, though. I don't have the means to produce a proper patch, but I know the first two of the above rules belong in /cvsroot/mozilla/toolkit/themes/winstripe/global/tree.css and the third is goes in /cvsroot/mozilla/toolkit/themes/winstripe/global/listbox.css. If someone wants to produce a patch, most of the work would already be done. This assumes that the proposed patch gets backed out first.

*** Bug 302946 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Note (from bug 302946) that if it doesn't get backed out or shrunk to 1px, that the height in at least the bookmarks manager and bookmarks sidebar, if not all tree rows, needs to be increased: apparently tree borders are part of the height, so adding a couple of px of border cuts off the bottom of favicons.

This is an untested patch that should switch the border to 1px instead of 2px.

better diff this time

Requesting blocking based on comment 16 and comment 19.

*** Bug 309333 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Aaron, can you back out this patch? It's one of the most visible UI "regressions" we shipped in beta and it would be great if we could undo this breakage. Thanks

Aaron, have you had a chance to get this backout together?

Comment on attachment 196123 [details] [diff] [review] 1px dotted border (untested) This patch looks good to me for both listbox and tree. The reason a simple backout wouldn't do is we previously had no style rule at all for focused list items.

Comment on attachment 196123 [details] [diff] [review] 1px dotted border (untested) approving for the branch. would be great if you could get this in today.