Sunday, August 24, 2008

I can't believe I haven't noticed this. Real color management in Firefox 3.0

I wrote earlier on how to enable color management in Firefox 3.0. It was great to see that finally a major browser next to Safari has color management, even if you have to go into a secret settings menu to enable it (see link above). At the time I assumed that the color management was just for images with attached tags. The same thing that Safari does. This would make Firefox, just like Safari, color foolish and causes lots of issues on Macs that are by default calibrated at a lower gamma than most windows PCs. However, and this was pointed out to me by outstanding photographer Greg Cope in a discussion on flickr, Firefox 3.0, with the color management enabled, color manages everything, CSS colors, text, and untagged images. If a page element has no attached profile, Firefox assumes sRGB. This is awesome and the absolute right thing to do. I tested it and it is absolutely true. If you have a Mac, enable this feature right away, even if you do not calibrate your screen. If you have a windows PC and you calibrate your screen, also enable this right away. On windows if you do not calibrate, the feature is not too useful as Windows assumes sRGB by default for the monitor profile. This brings Firefox quite a bit ahead of Safari and will make all web pages far better looking (no pale and too low contrast images anymore).

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