The bare dimmed glyph had nothing to read against. Over a light document in
a light theme it is a pale mark on white, and every rest opacity tried
(0.35, then 0.45, then 0.75 behind a text halo) came back reported as the
button being gone.
Give the control its own substrate, which is what every shipped overlay
does: Apple's HIG puts controls on a material rather than directly on
content, Firefox picture-in-picture draws close/unpip as opaque chips, and
Discord's overlay adds a contrast layer over the game. Deriving contrast
from the backdrop is not available to us either way -- mix-blend-difference
composites against the page, and behind a transparent Electron window that
is nothing.
The chip now wears the composer bar's own tokens (fill, hairline, radius,
bottom shadow), so it inverts with the theme and with the OS appearance
under mode 'system'. It rests hidden and fades in while the bar, the band,
or the chip itself is hovered, with a hold on the way out so it survives the
reach across the gap -- reaching for the HUD is the motion that means "I
want the app". Hover rather than focus: the caret gate behind #81893 broke
the escape hatch exactly when it was needed.
Brooklyn Nicholson
e10e344204