Fighting XP's hatred of black themes
Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Finding the elusive perfect black theme for windows XP is nigh impossible. The thwarted erroneous or inconsistent use of SYSCOLORs throughout applications inevitably leads to a mix mash of black on grey (Firefox says grey can only be spelled gray, silly thing), black on black, url-blue on black or many other unavoidable clashes that make using that particular program impossible or painful. Whether it be unchangeable background whites with white text or the fixed black font on the new dark-grey 3D windows there's always a reason to switch back to the eye-ball penetrating white themes. Even Microsoft applications lay foul to this problem - you'd expect proper SYSCOLOR usage here at least:


No matter what you do, that black text cannot be fixed, no matter what you do that blue header and frame in MSN cannot be fixed - no tweak will suffice. All black themes face these problems. The only way of fixing such issues I imagine is to apply a custom visual style to each problematic application and the only program that allows this, as far as I am aware is WindowBlinds, which I shudder to use as I like my system resources. This problem extends to browsers wherein web-pages adopt the default color schemes; browsing under the guise of blackness you become aware of the sites that assume everyone uses a black on white setup and the problems in creating an incomplete or ill-defined CSS stylesheet. For example, defining the backgrounds as white but leaving the default text, defining text-color within an input box but not its background color, visa versa, etc. In IE this cannot be fixed remotely and your theme becomes absolutely impossible to tolerate:


But in Firefox this problem can be fixed by overriding default theme values via the UserContent.css file, found here:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\PROFILE\chrome
for a standard installation. I added these settings:


Which changes the page (and others that rely on default schemes) to look like this:


A significant and usable improvement that allows for an improved and enjoyable browser experience. Note: It seems Firefox defines text-colour default to black and ignores the themes value, so no changes have to be made here. To have a browser working within a black theme becomes a significant benefit and the problems and woes of the few assorted clashes elsewhere become tolerable. Now a beautiful black theme such as Inverso-Reborn-Balanced can be used functionally in day to day life without just looking pretty (screenshot showing Foobar, Explorer and Notepad):



If only more applications allowed complete CSS re-styling of their user interface.

Labels: Technical

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