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GTK Dark Theme and Firefox
2018-05-08

I prefer dark themes on my GUIs. One great dark theme is the Arc-Dark theme.

Installing it on Fedora (dnf install arc-theme) was painless, as was activating it in Mate. Unfortunately, Firefox has some problems with that theme. If the website creator didn’t style his input boxes explicitly, Firefox choose some color from the GTK theme for the input box. It can happen that the website looks like crap or, even worse, you type gray text into a gray textbox. You can try for example http://www.bustaname.com/. I can type blind, but that is just stupid.

Fortunately I found a workaround.

  1. Open about:config in Firefox
  2. Create a new String value (right click), named widget.content.gtk-theme-override
  3. Set a light GTK theme name as the value, i chose Arc-Darker
  4. Restart Firefox

Now your Linux UI is dark, but Firefox will use a light theme for rendering the pages.

Btw, thanks Mozilla for ignoring the reported bug FOR FUCKING 17 YEARS!


Tags: linux misc

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