Friday, July 10, 2009

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.

8 comments:

  1. I'm a bit confused about your angst.... what does a display profile have to do with an image-profile test? Have you ever seen a non-test image on the web with a v4 profile?

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  2. I don't use Firefox, hence din't have the patience to do long tests, but now I know I am not crazy: Firefox 3.5 ignores my monitor profile (Huey PRO) with whatever secret color management mode is set: 0, 1 or 2.

    > Jeffrey: what does a display profile have to do with an image-profile test?

    Nothing. Jao said that in addition to dropping v4 support, it also ignores the display profile.

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  3. Dorin got it right. Because it lacks suport for v4 profiles, Firefox ignores many current display profiles. Huey is not the only one that makes v4 profiles by default but eyeone, colormunki, etc. all generate v4 profiles. So Firefox 3.5 is usually not actually color managing. As I said, FF 3.0 correctly grabs the monitor profile.

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  4. > Dorin got it right. Because it lacks suport for v4 profiles, Firefox ignores many current display profiles.

    Well, actually now I realize I didn't get it quite right. ;) Speaking of v4 profiles, I was thinking about image embedded profiles. I didn't have a clue about the fact the my calibrator software might have generated a v4 display profile, and that was the reason why FF 3.5 ignored it (Though it's just a bug).

    How does one check if a display profile is v2 or v4? Anyone knows any utility to check that? I am on Windows.

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  5. Dorin,

    you might be able to use this utility from MS. I think it also works on Vista, but I've never tried it myself. It shows gamut plots and should allow you to check the version of your profiles.

    I don't think you will often see a v4 icc profile on the web (safe for some test pages), so that part is not really the problem but the inability to read many display profiles is. At some point I would not be surprised if people start using the v4 sRGB profile as it can give better results (no blown out colors and fewer color shifts and such), but that might be a aways off.

    Cheers!

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  6. Gretag's EyeOne also makes v4.1 profiles...so I backgraded to firefox 3.0...hope they change this soon.

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  7. FF 3.5.2 still isn't working with some (my) monitor profile. Apparently my profile doesn't have tone reproduction curves....
    Bug report

    I wrote more about it here

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  8. still has many bugs but Firefox 3.6 has just launched recently ;))

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