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Comments on Increase contrast between current and other tabs in Firefox

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Increase contrast between current and other tabs in Firefox

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−0

In most recent Firefox versions I find it hard to distinguish the current tab at a glance, especially if the screen is set at low brightness. That is because the colors used for the current and other tabs are too similar.

Tab bar

I found a couple of extensions (1, 2, 3) but they are not monitored for security by Mozilla and they require accessing history or visited websites data.

What are my alternatives to increase tab colors contrast?

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Option 1: Choose a different theme

Just go to Settings > Extensions and Themes (shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+A) and choose a suitable theme.

Option 2: Use CSS to set the exact tab color

Firefox UI defaults to your system theme, which you may want to stick to or to only make a small adjustment. In this case, use userChrome.css:

userChrome.css in the chrome folder is a CSS file that can be used to change the way Mozilla applications' interfaces look. This file does not exist in a new profile. You can create it manually.

  1. Enter about:config in the address bar and toggle toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true.

  2. Enter about:support in the address bar, look for profile directory and open it.

  3. Enter the chrome directory (if absent, create it) and create the userChrome.css file with the following contents:

    #tabbrowser-tabs{
        background:  #900090 !important;
    }
    .tabbrowser-tab[selected] .tab-content{
        background:  #009090 !important;
        color:       #FFFFFF !important;
    }
    .tabbrowser-tab:not([selected]) .tab-content{
        background:  #FFFF00 !important;
        color:       #000000 !important;
    }
    

The colors — that are exaggerated for clarity — are in #RRGGBB format. Some generic names such as "green", "black" etc. also work.

When you restart Firefox the tab bar will look like this:

Tab bar after setting up the CSS

At this point, you may think that there is too much wasted space in the bar (although this really only changed colors). In this case, see compact mode workaround in Firefox.

If you would like to keep the button-like look, consider

#tabbrowser-tabs{
    background:  #900090 !important;
}
.tab-background[selected]{
    background:  #009090 !important;
}
.tab-background:not([selected]){
    background:  #FFFF00 !important;
}

which yields (with compact mode applied):

Tab bar after setting up the CSS

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3 comment threads

Windows Theme Color (1 comment)
About your point 2.2: instead of going to `about:support` and then looking for the profiles, it might... (2 comments)
Just an FYI with regard to more expansive Firefox UI styling (2 comments)
Windows Theme Color
Ullallulloo‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Note that if you are on Windows and want the background color to match your Windows theme color like it did pre-92, you can set the color to -moz-accent-color.