When choosing dark colours for the 'Header Background Colour', the search bar is difficult to locate. This behaviour was not present in the earlier releases when the search bar always had white background. Hence this is a regression bug.

There is no way to customise the colours on the instance to make the search field more visible. It always takes the header colour as its colour.

Possible Solution

• making the search bar background color customizable would solve this
• alternatively, we could de-link the search bar colour with the top bar colour

Workaround:

Apply following CSS in the announcement banner:
Please test this script to see if it breaks any JIRA UI or functionality.

<style>
#quickSearchInput {
border-radius: 5em;
background: rgba(255,255,255,1);
color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}

#quickSearchInput::-webkit-input-placeholder {
    color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}
#quickSearchInput:-moz-placeholder {
    /#quickSearchInput FF 4-18 #quickSearchInput/
    color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}
#quickSearchInput::-moz-placeholder {
    /#quickSearchInput FF 19+ #quickSearchInput/
    color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}
#quickSearchInput:-ms-input-placeholder {
    /#quickSearchInput IE 10+ #quickSearchInput/
    color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}

.aui-header .aui-quicksearch::after{
color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}
</style>