I did some testing. I first upgraded the 32b version to 47 and the issue did not occur. I then upgraded to 48 and the issue is present there. I submitted a bug report.

I am trying to find FF users who use high-contrast or other accessibility features. I’m also trying to find a user group of any kind who require accesibiity features – does anyone have any direction to help with this?

Hi Lon, I'm not sure how to find a user group related to accessibility, but there is a mailing list: https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/accessibility

Does it matter whether your Firefox window is maximized or resizable, or do you get black-on-black in both cases?

Could you provide a link to the bug report you filed?

Thank you for your response and the link to the mailing list.

Here’s the link to my bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1298645

This was marked as a duplicate, which is correct. My apologies – I did do a search first but did not find any of the other related reports. I’m having some trouble understanding the terminology but here’s what I have gleaned from the reports. Could you perhaps help me out with this?

First it seems that my report was marked as a duplicate of this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1292997

That bug was marked as a duplicate of this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1022547

Here’s my interpretation going by the user descriptions: 1292997 does describe my issue exactly – where the text does not display at all over the black background.

1022547 seems to be different. That one seems to describe a condition where the text does display, but with a “glow” effect. I also had this occur, but didn’t think of it as a bug or a problem since I could still read the text.

I’ve tried other things to no effect: maximize and restore the window, and toggled on and off the menu bar, and even the bookmarks bar in different combinations. In the grand scheme of things, this is not all that big of an inconvenience. Most, if not all the menu bar functions can be found elsewhere, and if not, I can still find what I need because the buttons themselves do still work and I can find the option I need without a whole lot of trouble. And, it’s most definitely not enough to make me want to switch to another browser!

Well, the good news is that bug will be fixed in Firefox 51. But of course that is months away.

Perhaps you can use the style rule change from the bug in a custom style rule right now? If you want to try it:

First, I recommend installing the Stylish extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/stylish/

Then try this style rule to see whether it works. Toolbar-modifying rules sometimes do not take effect immediately in the same window, so you could launch a new window (Ctrl+n) to see whether it worked.

https://userstyles.org/styles/132146/menu-bar-on-high-contrast-windows-64-bit-firefox

Excellent – that is good news. I will probably try the other settings, but I don’t mind waiting. Just knowing it’s on the list is enough – no other software community that I know of updates the users of these things – it’s a wait and see game.

The menu bar in general is probably the one UI element that has been around since Windows 3.1 and has been a part of almost every desktop app and has been consistent with its options. The first two are always File and Edit, then you usually have View and Tools, then others more specific to the program. There seems to be a faction of the dev community wanting to do away with the menu bar and it seems to be lead either by Apple or Google. They first hide it by default and see what the reaction is. Like in iTunes. Same with Chrome, but I’m not sure – it may be totally out of Chrome by now. Some of us have been using it for 25 years now – and maybe it’s not the best way to do whatever it’s being replaced by. But at this point, why get rid of it? Some things are objectively just more intuitive than others, while other things are subjective and are about preference. With Apple, you could at least trust them to know what the best objective solution was, even if it meant re-learning something. But with Google, it seems to me that many changes are made just for the sake of change. Look at Gmail. The most important buttons for a message will always be reply, reply all and forward. But they are no longer the predominant buttons. Then there’s the system of “labels” which are really supposed to be folders.

With iOS, Apple took the first steps in trying to get us away from thinking in terms of the file system, the old directory trees. But that’s how data is stored. But to get away from our need to have control over the file system, and even to stop thinking in terms of files and documents, it will take some really special apps that get us to think in terms of content, not files. And with all this storage at our fingertips, we will need to be able to get at our content quickly and intuitively and without having to enter a lot of tags and meta keywords – even if things do continue to evolve that way. Maybe it will just be about voice control, to tag content using plain language, and have a very smart Siri or Cortana that knows what we are asking for. And it will also mean that we need to move a few cooks from the kitchen and let the ones that remain do more. When I’m working on a web project, I have several starting points that lead me to my resources. Email messages – with folder organization. File system structures. Browser bookmarks. Application shortcuts that can start from the Start Menu, Task Bar, Desktop, or a user created folder with user-created shortcuts. One of these things will rise to the top and I can see it being the browser. Just give me the option to maintain several main bookmarks bars and swap them at will, and let me point bookmarks to not only websites, but local applications, folders and files, and specific email messages. Maybe the browser doesn’t have to become a complete OS – but just the part that we interact with. And FF with its layout looks to me like that’s what I want to be doing!

I finally got around to installing the 64-bit version on a test Windows 10 system and had to repair the user style. It should be working better now, it lets you pick from a short list of colors instead of trying to "inherit" the default color, which didn't seem to work as I had expected.