The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.
~ Horace Walpole.
If you’re using Linux and run Firefox1, there is one thing you will notice when you are on a dark themed GTK2 based environment: the HTML content would adapt to the theme color. Sounds nice in theory, but in practice it means websites suddenly render with dark backgrounds and light text whether they were designed for it or not, and half the internet becomes hard to read.
And for some reason I don’t know why Firefox still doesn’t fix this stuff. Here is the link related to the issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1527048
UPDATE: Seems this problem has been fixed in Version 67 of Firefox.
🛠️ The Workaround
In case you are on an older version, or you just want to control the look yourself, here is the workaround for it. It is three quick steps and takes less than a minute:
1. Open about:config
Open about:config inside Firefox. You should type this in the URL bar, and accept the warning that follows. This is the advanced settings panel, so just do not change anything you do not understand.
2. Create the Theme Override
Right click on the content and click New > String with key widget.content.gtk-theme-override and value Arc-Darker. The key name matters, so type it exactly as written, and the value tells Firefox which GTK theme to use for rendering web content.
3. Restart Firefox
Restart Firefox. The restart is what makes the new setting take effect.
The steps above would set Firefox content to adapt to a white based theme while retaining the dark chrome theme. You could also use Adwaita as value, if that is the theme already installed on your system, or any other light theme you prefer.
🧠 Final Thoughts
So guys, have you ever encountered this bug specifically in Gnome 3 while using Firefox? It is one of those little desktop annoyances that quietly ruins your reading experience until you know the fix, and after that it is thirty seconds of work. Hope you guys enjoyed this article and as always live life!
- Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation. Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine to render web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. ↩︎
- GTK is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. ↩︎