Hewitt rewrote the XUL <colorpicker> widget so it is a button that when clicked on opens a popup with the array of color swatches. (Bug 56150). It supports key-navigation, which is a good thing. That behavior used to require having the attribute type="button" on the colorpicker, but recent changes to both Classic and Modern themes have made this the default. In Composer, we extend the functionality of the colorpicker and now the array of swatches does not show on the top area of our popup (which is a small dialog), as it used to. This is not acceptable, as users are required to do three clicks just to pick a color. This widget needs to be redesigned so we can include just the array of color swatches as we did before, but with keyboard navigation.

#include std_colorpicker_bug_comment.mpt I think that wherever GUI needs to be provided for selecting a color -- in the Preferences, in Composer's toolbar, or wherever -- the GUI should be the same. This would be a bog-standard popup menu, with the eight most recently-used colors for that situation (defaulting to eight commonly-used colors), a separator, and an `Other ...' item. The `Other ...' item would bring up the native colorpicker for that platform (GTK, Mac OS, Qt, Win32), or the XP colorpicker if it's considered to be at least twice as good usability-wise as the native one for a particular platform. With regard to this bug, the use of a popup menu would mean that in most cases users would just need to perform a single drag -- rather than three clicks -- to select a color.

My orginal claim seems not to be true! I.e., you have to put type="button" to replace full color array with the new color button. Joe promised to help with bug 64160: make the new color array focusable in Composer's use of <colorpicker>