Dark mode - active tab contrast is too low

[aguscruiz]

Description

Seeing various threads on reddit about the contrast of active tabs being too low, so I'm making a small tweak to improve the contrast a bit and make it closer to our color theme contrast.

Examples
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1h9okcm/looking_for_a_browser_theme_that_is_dark_but/

Contrast details

Current color themes tabbar/active-tab backgrounds (Chromium's default):

Current dark gray themes tabbar/active-tab backgrounds:

New dark gray themes tabbar/active-tab backgrounds:

Actual result

Expected result

Reproduces how often

Easily reproduced

Brave version (brave://version info)

---

Channel information

• release (stable)
• beta
• nightly

Reproducibility

• with Brave Shields disabled
• with Brave Rewards disabled
• in the latest version of Chrome

Miscellaneous information

No response

[LaurenWags]

@aguscruiz please add the following required labels as appropriate:

• QA/Yes or QA/No
• release-notes/exclude or release-notes/include

cc @kjozwiak

[aguscruiz]

Added them, sorry @LaurenWags ! cc @rebron in case you want to exclude them from release notes

[MadhaviSeelam]

Verification PASSED using

Brave | 1.75.159 Chromium: 132.0.6834.83 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)
-- | --
Revision | a7b6f5093a2dad31fc3f56241a7d55be255e69e2
OS | Windows 11 Version 24H2 (Build 26100.2605)

Compared with 1.73.x and confirmed active contrast shown as expected in various themes.

1.73.x | 1.75.x

example	example	example	example	example	example	example	example	example

[NicholasFlamy]

So I'm not going crazy, this is a recent thing. Well, I might make a feature request for highlighting the current tab in neon red or something because I hate when these anti-UX UI changes happen. (And most of these bad changes are by Google through Chromium.)

[el-pol]

thank you!