Comment 9 for bug 40051

> - themes with widgets that have rounded borders (e.g. buttons, text entry
> boxes in Clearlooks) seem to render the default gtk background color around
> their edges

What you're seeing is actually a gradient border (only 3px wide in Novell's Gilouche theme, so it doesn't look very gradient-like to me) drawn by the buttons and text entry boxes themselves. It depend on the button/textbox geometry so we can't pretend it's just part of the parent widget. The gradient is designed based on the assumption that the background was also drawn by the theme. If I tweak the theme border width to 2px, it turns off the gradient and looks OK, but of course that's a fairly significant visual change.

I guess I could imagine reinterpreting the theme to use a gradient with varying alpha so that you get approximately the right results when drawn onto the theme background color, and a smooth blend onto any other background. Nevertheless this needs to be discussed with the theme designers to see how they think their theme should behave for HTML given they can't make assumptions about what the background looks like ... it's a design constraint that they obviously didn't have in mind before, and something they need to think about.