Color management in Safari is broken in Mavericks too.

I've written here about the color management problems with Lightroom on Mavericks before here and here. With the recent release of OS X 10.9.5, color management now appears to work right in Aperture and in iPhoto. However, it is still broken in Safari and preview. This is quite disturbing. Amazingly, both Chrome and Firefox do the color management right. It appears that Safari has built-in code to deal with sRGB tagged images because it treats them differently than any other embedded profile. It ignores the sRGB gamma curve and assumes it is the same as your display gamma profile! Below is a little test link for your pleasure to illustrate the problem. Rollover to switch between adobeRGB and sRGB tagged images. The sRGB image will have the darkest patches blocked completely in Safari. The adobeRGB image is correctly displayed. In Chrome on Mac OS X, since it is color managed, you will see only a very subtle difference due to the gammas being different in adobeRGB and sRGB and there therefore being subtle bit errors but both displays are essentially correct. The same is true for Firefox.

Mouse over to see the problem. Loading the alternate image might take a few seconds. You won't see it unless you are on Mavericks/Yosemite and are using Safari. If the darker patches change brightness, you have the bug.

On a well behaved browser these two images should be close to identical. Safari in Mavericks (I tested 7.1) is no longer well behaved and completely destroys the shadows. It is important to note that preview.app is also broken but in a different way. Strangely it does not display black correctly. Aperture and iPhoto do behave correctly as of 10.9.5 but used to be wrong in earlier versions of Mac OS X Mavericks. Photoshop, since it uses its own color management routines, behaves correctly too. Lightroom only behaves correctly in the Library views as I have shown before. In Develop it has the same blocked shadow problem as you see in Safari. This problem is non-existent in 10.8.

Edit: Before any confusion arises, I need to explain the numbers in the images above. The sRGB version of the image shows the values of r,g,and b in the sRGB color space as encoded in the file. The adobeRGB version is the same file, but converted to adobeRGB color space in Photoshop. The numbers are still the r,g,b values of the patches in sRGB space, but the file is simply encoded in adobeRGB. The display should therefore be identical in correctly color managed environments as it is in Photoshop. EDIT:10/17/14. Finally got around to installing Yosemite. Unsurprisingly, this is still broken in Safari like it is in Mavericks and the Webkit nightlies. Unfortunate. Strange that this is not getting picked up as this bug is present on every single Mac that has Mavericks or Yosemite installed. No matter whether it is hardware calibrated or not. Mac OS pre Mavericks did not have this bug.

Chrome suddenly color managed

This one snuck by me. I have complained many times in the past about deficiencies in browser color management. Chrome and Firefox are seen wavering back and forth all the time. I recently lamented the fact that Chrome was not color managed. However, I happened to open it recently and noticed that the color was not off as I was used to on my wide gamut screen (Chrome version 16.0.912.75). In fact it looked 'normal'! So I quickly whipped up a comparison between browser and the gold standard in color management: Photoshop. The screenshot was converted from my monitor profile to sRGB for web display.



As you can see, contrary to my previous post using Chrome 13, it is now color managed! This is great news as we now have three browsers that are color managed, at least on Mac OS X. I understand that on Windows, the latest Chrome is not yet color managed, which if true, is a shame. Nevertheless, this is a great development and a return to what I called "web browser bliss" years ago, but what was dampened from that initial optimism since then because of regressions at Mozilla and Google. Here is to hoping that the last holdout IE, which still does not convert to the display profile as it should, will at some time join 21st century even if 2012 is a little late for finally doing what was proposed by Microsoft themselves in 1996.

Finally, by checking the icc v4 testing page in all browsers, I can now report the following for the browser versions current at the date of posting:

Browser	icc v2 compliant?	icc v4 compliant?	converts to display profile?	assumes sRGB for untagged images?
Safari	yes	yes	yes	no
Chrome	yes	yes	yes	no
Firefox	yes	no	yes (some v4 profiles work!)	no (yes with secret setting enabled)

In conclusion, if you are on a Mac and care about color rendering, I can now heartily recommend Chrome next to Firefox and Safari.

Firefox 3.6 beta

The Firefox folks released a new beta of FF 3.6. Color management is still broken badly in it. This in contrast with Chrome and Safari.

Firefox 3.5 color management

Am I nuts or did Firefox 3.5 release break their color management? It no longer passes the icc test whereas Firefox 3.0 with the secret setting would perfectly. It also no longer grabs my monitor profile where 3.0 would correctly! What is going on here? If this is true than Firefox messed up in a major fashion!





EDIT: It's true. Firefox 3.5 dropped support for v4 profiles. This is a major step backwards. Most display calibration solutions nowadays generate v4 profiles and therefore color management will not work in FF 3.5. FF 3.05 works just fine. Very disappointing.

Yes, webbrowser bliss is here

Google has just released a Developer release of Chrome for Mac OS X and lo-and-behold, it still color manages. I was afraid that there was a chance that google would disable it in the final releases, so I am very happy to see this happening. Chrome manages exactly like Safari in that it doesn't manage untagged images nor CSS colors. Firefox has a mode that will color manage everything and the upcoming Firefox 3.5 will have Safari-like management turned on by default. This will cause the situation to soon be that 3 major browsers will be color managed and the dinky exception will be IE. Excellent! Now if somebody could check out if the latest developer builds for windows also color manage (use this simple page) that would be excellent. The current release on windows doesn't but it would be superb if they are changing that too.

Here is the proof: Three color managing browsers on my Mac with a wide gamut screen (screenshot converted back from my display profile to sRGB so you will see the right colors too). The colors in these images are rendered exactly the same as I found out by substracting them in Photoshop.

A new day! Firefox color manages by default

Firefix is now enabling icc support by default in their new beta! See this page. This is great news



The default settings only enable color correction for tagged images, just like Safari does. You can enable full color management in a similar way as before. There is now a "gfx.color_management.mode" variable in the about:config box that you set to 1 in order to also manage untagged images and CSS colors as if they are sRGB. This is very helpful for folks with wide gamut displays. IE as always is far behind in this field.

To be complete: Here is a link showing how to enable color management in the current Firefox release. Doing this indeed color manages even untagged images. A very important feature.

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).

Firefox 3.0 released

Today, to great fanfare (and an embarrassing server crash) Firefox 3.0 got released. This is a great and fast browser even if on the Mac I prefer Safari. One of the promises it held was that finally, there would be a mainstream browser outside Safari that supports color management. Unfortunately, it is not enabled by default which is a very bad decision. There is no good reason for this and the quoted reasons (incorrect color in pages that mix CSS elements and images) is just plain wrong technically. Color managed apps will only color manage images that have a profile. Image elements on webpages never have those, so the appearance will not change. Luckily, there is an option to enable color management in Firefox that is hidden in the secret configuration pages. You enable it by typing "about:config" in the address bar (without quotes). Click "I'll be careful" and you'll get a page with many obscure settings. In the Filter box, type "management" and the only two relevant options will come up. Make sure that display_profile is set to the default, and double click on the"enabled" property to change its value into "true." This will turn on color management and will make those images on the web that have profiles embedded appear as they were meant (as long as you have calibrated your monitor). Even images in sRGB will benefit from this. This really should be the default and I think it is a major error that they did not enable this at least as a visible preference. Next time better I hope.



To learn why this is really important, see this excellent explanation. Test your color managed browser here.

Edit: it turns out that Firefox 3.0 color manages every image, even untagged ones. That is a superb choice!

Finally

An amazing thing just happened. Apple just came out with a version of Safari for windows. What this means for photographers is that there is finally a browser on windows that color corrects images (even if it is quite buggy)! I tested it and it works! Respecting embedding profiles is extraordinary important as is evident from this excellent 7-page writeup. It's been extremely embarrassing and annoying that even in Vista, IE does not respect embedded profiles, but even worse that Firefox does not color correct on any platform. Let's hope that Safari's excellent example will lead the way.

Safari and blogger

Well so far I only found one major annoyance, which is that composing in blogger doesn't work right in Safari. Things like adding an image will not work at all. Luckily the site works great in Firefox, my second choice in browsers. I was also annoyed to find out that if you let blogger scale the image, it forgets to include the icc profile in the scaled image's icc profile. Very bad!. iWeb at least maintained the profile if the image was tagged with one. Even with that, I think I'll stick with it for the time being. iWeb is simply impossible for photographers as it has a nasty bug where uploaded images suddenly have little white lines on the top or the bottom, forcing you to resize the image by 1 pixel increments (or decrements) until it gets it right. Of course, you can only seen this after you upload the site. Perhaps Apple will get this right in the rumored new version of iLife as they marked my submitted bug on this as duplicate, but I am not holding my breath.