[Feature Request] Add a flag to disable blue/red color of buttons

[valyy151]

It would be nice if there was a flag to disable the blue/red color of buttons like the home, refresh, extensions and customize buttons.

Nothing wrong with the colors, but for some people appearance means a lot, even tiny things like this.

Other than that, this browser is a fantastic!

[Huskydude422]

I also think this is a good idea, the only thing keeping me on the browser right now is being able to switch to the new chromium theme where the colored buttons haven't been added yet

[gz83]

thanks for your advice

[Vibhav201]

Yes, I only have two reasons Thorium can't be my primary browser.

1. The ugly icon colors
2. No repository for my distro / No Flatpak availability.

[yokoffing]

Yes, please let us use the colors of the default themes.

[Nekosis]

I do agree that this should definitely be an option at the very least. Chrome themes were not designed with these colors in mind, so they clash with most of them.

[ionutbortis]

+1 just installed and configured Thorium and the first thing I googled is how to change the blue button accents 😅

[mezhgano]

+1
Please change these icons color to default or let people disable custom colors, this looks kind of inconsistent for some people, include me

[wadegbow]

+1

Settings to change the color or hide these icons would be a great addition.

[thataboy]

+1 The hard coded blue icons don't show up well when using a dark theme. The default icons seem fine to me and there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Seems like your energy is better spent elsewhere

[LoganDark]

Thorium is unusable for me because of this. :/

It makes no sense that the button colors have to be changed just because it's a chromium fork. Please revert them back or at least provide a flag to turn this off... I can't stand all the buttons being different colors with low contrast. They're so ugly :(

[LoganDark]

It looks like enabling the new design refresh fixes the button colors, but that adds a dropdown arrow on the left of the tab strip which I can't seem to turn off. That's still better than the ugly buttons though.

[lofcz]

+1 dehardcode this please and allow users to revert to default. @Alex313031

[Alex313031]

@LoganDark @ionutbortis @wadegbow @mezhgano @thataboy @gz83 Many users have requested this, and I FINALLY did the work for it! Next release will have the flag chrome://flags/#disable-thorium-icons

See commit > ad4ea69

If you have an AVX2 capable CPU, then you can try it live in the AVX2 repo, where I made a release slightly newer than the rest of the platforms, and it has this patch in it. > https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Linux-AVX2/releases/tag/M120.0.6099.276

[Alex313031]

@LoganDark @ionutbortis @wadegbow @mezhgano @thataboy Added in all releases now that M121 is released today. Closing issue now.

[AntoninoScordino]

Apprecietate how this was "fixed", but I honestly think that it might still a bit inconsistent considering that some icons are black and white, while others are not: especially with the "bright" red cross, which makes everything a bit awkward. But if this is "non-fixable" and rather hard to further implement, I won't judge such decision. Although, such dedication to low-priorities issues should stille be admired. Cheers :-)

[Alex313031]

@AntoninoScordino @LoganDark @ionutbortis @wadegbow @mezhgano @thataboy

For M122, I can make it where the red cross on the reload button is back to upstream when the flag is enabled, that is easy and I actually should have done that when I made the patch and flag this time around.

However, any other secondary UI icon changes like the little triangles in the menus will not be changed as I said in the release notes, that's too much work when noone seems to care about those and they look Ok in light mode/dark mode anyway (IMO)

I originally changed the back/forward menu button's icons and the main menu button icon to add some differentiation in thorium besides the logo and name change. I then added color to add some pizzazz, and to make the top bar less "boring" grey. It looks fine to me because I only ever use the default light or default dark theme, where the blue looks nice. But I forgot that many people use themes, and since the .icon files are hard coded, they don't change with themes, and I understand that it can look ugly, or be downright impossible to see (for example if the theme's background matches the blue color of the icons), and it was a much requested feature. I didn't know how to make it where it could be toggled by a flag until more recently where I dedicated myself to it and read through lots of code to see how styling is applied to the icons.

Anyway, I will fix this @AntoninoScordino next release. At least for now it is better than it was.

[LoganDark]

I originally changed the back/forward menu button's icons and the main menu button icon to add some differentiation in thorium

Yeah, hopefully this can become fully optional in the future, since the speed/efficiency improvements are the main reason I'm interested in Thorium, not random deviations from Chromium's quite nice design :)

[Alex313031]

@LoganDark Do you mean the shapes of the back/forward and menu icons?

[LoganDark]

@LoganDark Do you mean the shapes of the back/forward and menu icons?

I'm not fully sure, you just said there are still some visual changes that aren't controlled by the new flag. As long as they don't look out of place I think it should be fine, I'm just saying that in general, I don't think Thorium should have to make those kinds of visual changes purely to differentiate itself. That's usually a mistake if Thorium's UI changes aren't held to the same standard as vanilla Chromium, since it lowers the quality/consistency of the UI.

No offense of course, just prefer to keep things vanilla~

[Alex313031]

@LoganDark Well, I can make it where the flag makes those three icons use upstream.

I'm talking about these:

And the ones im talking about that I wont change are this:

However, the top three are debatable, because most people just want the color reverted, they don't care about the shape of the button. Personally, I don't really care either way about the back/forward buttons, but the main menu IMO makes alot more sense as it is a standard "hamburger menu", rather than a "three dots menu" that almost no other application uses besides chromium.

[LoganDark]

@LoganDark Well, I can make it where the flag makes those three icons use upstream.

I'm talking about these:

And the ones im talking about that I wont change are this:

However, the top three are debatable, because most people just want the color reverted, they don't care about the shape of the button. Personally, I don't really care either way about the back/forward buttons, but the main menu IMO makes alot more sense as it is a standard "hamburger menu", rather than a "three dots menu" that almost no other application uses besides chromium.

Maybe the icon shapes should be a separate flag, but yeah.

As long as the one you won't change can still have its color reverted by the color flag you just implemented, I think it should be fine.

[AntoninoScordino]

However, the top three are debatable, because most people just want the color reverted, they don't care about the shape of the button.

Maybe you could make something like New tab button flag? An option with sotck Chromium shapes and one with your own kind of shapes (which I honestly like) could be done.

Nevertheless, if you remove the red cross along with some other changes that are not findable on the new Chrome refresh, that would "somewhat" fix the blue arrow(s).

However, any other secondary UI icon changes like the little triangles in the menus will not be changed as I said in the release notes, that's too much work when noone seems to care about those and they look Ok in light mode/dark mode anyway

Although, I don't get it, why is it hard to implement? Is it also related to preferring to keep Thorium different from the other Chromium fork(s) or just consists in writing even more code than the one needed for the flag?

Nonetheless, thank you for taking your time and answering such questions.

[arjpar]

I would prefer the colors to be opt-in, or it could be opt-out as well, I see that as perfectly reasonable. It could be a flag.

[Flonky]

I would prefer the colors to be opt-in, or it could be opt-out as well, I see that as perfectly reasonable. It could be a flag.

I have to agree with this. The colours are ignoring all theming and really stand out, so it should definitely at least be possible to opt-out of them completely.

[Huskydude422]

I also think this is a good idea, the only thing keeping me on the browser right now is being able to switch to the new chromium theme where the colored buttons haven't been added yet

almost 7 months later and changing the colors back completely STILL isn't an option, and now I can't use the chrome refresh to get around the ugly colors 🙃 why even add the colors to begin with???

[highbaser]

I use Thorium with #disable-thorium-icons turned on.

This displays the icon set in a half-way state.

• X icons still have red color, including widget close buttons.
• Extension puzzle icon (upper right corner) is still blue.
• Other icons have no colors.

I personally like the red X icon, even if other icons don't have any colors because the red X is much more distinguishable, e.g. while a page is loading and the refresh icon is replaced to the red X icon temporarily. However, I dislike the triangle back ◁ and forward ▷ buttons. They feel so much alien from a browser's UI. At least these shapes could be filled from the inside and look like ◀ and ▶, however arrows would be much better.

@Alex313031 The flag you've already implemented should revert all changes to icons, including their shapes.
So when turned off:

• Back, forward buttons should be arrows, not triangles.
• All icons should have their original shape and no color.
• You may still keep the red color of the X icon. 😉

Also, if icon colors were less vivid or saturated, they would feel less intrusive.

However, I think the adjustment could be a more sophisticated one. I think everyone would be happy with the following choices.

• "Disabled" should be removed and the flag should be just "Thorium Top Bar icons" so Disabled would mean that the feature is completely disabled and it's like upstream.