Change color of the badge

[slootmaekersdirk]

Hello,

At the moment the color of the badge is red, is it possible to pass along the color while setting the badge counter?
thanks
Dirk

[fallaciousreasoning]

Are you talking about OSX specifically? I think the operating system decides what color the badge will be, browsers don't have control over it. We could add support for this on Windows, but no other platforms (Chrome OS will likely enforce a color, Android apps can't set a badge color, iOS apps can't set a badge color). As such, I think it's unlikely we'll add something to the API for this (unfortunately).

[fallaciousreasoning]

I'm going to leave this issue open, as it is definitely worth thinking about.

[canove]

I'm just started using it on my react PWA app, and here the color is Black (#26252D).

Its a great API anyway, but would be nice to choose the color.

[marcoscaceres]

I don't think we should allow this, tbh. It's would conflict with OS conventions and could hinder accessibility.

To be clear, the OS should handle contrast, and finding the right colors, etc.

It would also affect things like dark mode, which would be outside the scope of the web application: the web application may be showing a badge, but the applications might be closed.

[marcoscaceres]

closing, as it's not feasible.

[diekus]

Reopening to consider as it is platform dependent and the UA could just ignore this if it is not supported.

[marcoscaceres]

Question from TPAC:

• Is this covered by theme color?
• What happens if the color gets changed repeatedly? (maybe only the first color counts?)
• System theme color? (default color)

[fallaciousreasoning]

Is this covered by theme color?

Hmmm, I guess it could be but I don't know if we could trust that app icons from the past will look good if we start using the theme color to badge them rather than red (on Mac) and black (on windows) (i.e. if the icon is mostly the theme color.

What happens if the color gets changed repeatedly? (maybe only the first color counts?)

I don't think we'd want to limit this to the first color - maybe we could use the last one but let user agents throttle the update rate, like we do for normal badge updates?

[marcoscaceres]

let user agents throttle the update rate, like we do for normal badge updates?

No one actually throttles, AFAIK (even though we make that recommendation).

We could continue to make the recommendation to throttle. The larger question is if there's a use case for switching color or if we should bake it into the API that you can only set it once (and may otherwise be ignored).