You can learn so much just by trying to submit a patch. It’s is nice to get the commit but it isn’t a requirement to learn something about the issue.

The back story

You can’t put rgba inside of a placeholder property, for example:

::-webkit-input-placeholder {
   color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.30);
}

but you can do this:

::-webkit-input-placeholder {
   color:#e8e8e8;
}

Also Takashi Irie (author of Twenty Fourteen) after some research found out that Firefox 19 lowers the opacity of the placeholder to 0.54 by default. To get the correct color you need to reset it.

So to properly use the color and the opacity you want you would have to do this:

::-webkit-input-placeholder {
   color:#e8e8e8;
   opacity: 1;
}

What I though would be an easy open source hat trick.

1. Trac Ticket
2. Patch Submission
3. Core Contribution

Turned into a learning something new and you know it’s not all about the commit…