System Color Override

Izmosis

Hi all. I switched to Vivaldi from Chrome when a Chrome update made it so it's appearance was the same as my system color settings. Vivaldi did not do this and with Dark Reader everything was fine. When working on a website I could disable Dark Reader so I could see the true colors of the site. This morning I was having an issue that when I would click on the "Back" arrow all tabs, all windows would disappear, close. So I thought Vivaldi might need to be updated to the latest version. I did the update and now Vivaldi looks exactly like Chrome using my high contrast system colors.

I don't want to have to change my system colors every time I want to check the appearance and colors of the pages I'm working on.

Evidently the update changed some things but I have to figure this out as it greatly impairs my ability to get things done using this browser.

Btw, I have a vision impairment that makes it very difficult to deal with bright white spaces and hard to see details. I thought I'd found the perfect answer using Vivaldi and Dark Reader. Now, I'm back to where I was with Chrome.

What changed, how can I get Vivaldi to ignore Windows 10 Pro system colors?

Thanks for your time,
Iz

luetage

@Izmosis Check your flags, what have you enabled in vivaldi://flags?

Pathduck

It's this one again:
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/57170/3-7-2202-3-forces-high-contrast-mode-on-web-pages
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/457763

https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5757293075365888
"Enabled by default (tracking bug) in: Chrome for desktop release 89"
(Vivaldi 3.7 is based on Chromium 89)

They really should put this one in the FAQs...

luetage

@Pathduck Is the flag enabled by default?

Izmosis

@luetage "Forced Colors" was set to "Default". I disabled it and now I'm good.

I should know better than to think that just because I didn't change a setting that it didn't change. Don't know why it did with the update but apparently it did. Interestingly before I went to Vivaldi from Chrome I disabled the same flag and it made no difference.

Thanks for asking the right question.

Izmosis

@luetage said in System Color Override:

vivaldi://flags

Thanks again for your help. Interestingly when looking at flags in Chrome, for this particular setting there are more choices;

I tried them all and none were acceptable for my purposes. And again, disabling "Force Dark Mode" doesn't work. I'm glad it does in Vivaldi.

luetage

@Izmosis I tried the different dark mode settings too. The problem is on most sites the algorithm produces very high contrast with deep blacks and glaring whites, which doesn’t do it for me. I rather use the original light version in this case. Most dark reader extensions have similar behaviour. The automatic theming is generally awful. But websites don’t do such a good job either. You have to look no further than reddit, which introduced an unusable dark mode a few years ago. It’s painful, but for sites you care about you gotta write your own theme.

Izmosis

With the forced dark mode disabled using Dark Reader works really well for me. I don't have a problem with dark mode except for the fact that websites often have subtle elements like some text, borders, bounding boxes, icons etc. and when the scheme is deep and dark these things are hard to see if you can see them at all. This is not a problem with the OS interface but web pages...now if I can figure out why when I click on certain links (like logging into Wordpress this morning) everything, all tabs, all windows just disappear. No error notices, no indication of what just happened. I'll see how it goes and hopefully I won't see this behavior often.