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.

Why I do not use Chrome - even though it is fantastic

Is captured in the below screenshot


Click for full resolution.
Left Firefox 5, middle Safari 5.1, right Chrome 13.0.782.107. As you can see, Chrome renders the desert sunset image drastically different. The subtle orange hue turns into red.
This is as seen on my wide gamut display that was calibrated user a Spyder 3. I converted the screenshot from my display profile to sRGB for web display so this cut down a large portion of the difference as the red orange is out of sRGB gamut. In reality it is more drastic than can be shown on the web. The sidebar image of the patch of marsh flowers in Mayflower Gulch for example renders in a very garish green and comically red mountain range. The shadow portions under the flowers are too dark and some detail disapears.

The reason for these differences is that Google in their infinite wisdom when they released chrome cut out color management which had been enabled and present in the developer releases for mac. And despite widespread outcries, it hasn't been fixed and the flag that you can use on windows to enable color management does not work on Macs and apparently not even on windows anymore. If you are a photographer or designer who calibrates their screens, this really impacts you and all your images will display wrong in Chrome on your system. Only Safari and Firefox (if you make sure to calibrate to a v2 icc profile) will work correct. Firefox has an advantage over Safari in that it will even color manage untagged images if you set it up to do so in the secret settings. The failing of Chrome in rendering images correctly is especially strong if you work on a wide gamut display or on a laptop display. On good normal (sRGB gamut) screens it is even a problem for shadow rendering where unmanaged browsers will show you plugged up shadows. This is due to the fact that the display is calibrated for gamma 2.2, while sRGB has a linear tone curve in the shadows. This might not be that big of a deal as the hyper saturation that you get on wide-gamut displays though.

I understand that Chrome cut out its color management to make sure Chrome renders like Internet Explorer and to be slightly faster than with color management, but why would you want to target the lowest common denominator? It's a pity because it is otherwise a fast and capable browser and I actually prefer it for most other uses especially Google+. I would be happy with a simple flag I can enable somewhere as I realize that not everybody needs this.

Please Google, give me a flag!

Links: Why color management is so important in browsers. All about color profiles and color managed apps here.

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.

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.

Chrome color managed?

Chrome, Google's new browser that is based on WebKit, was not color managed in the release for windows. I saw a link to some prerelease binaries of Chrome for the Mac on Daring Fireball. And lo and behold. Doing a little test shows that these prerelease builds of Chrome now color manage tagged images. It doesn't manage untagged images like Firefox does, but uses the Safari method. This is a very good development and counters my initial criticism. Thanks Google!

Illustration: Chrome color managed!

New Chrome release

See here and download here (not really ;-) ). Still no color management like modern browsers such as Safari and Firefox have, even though Chromium is based on WebKit (the core of Safari). Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Also, even though it has WebKit roots, there is no Mac version.

Update. I just discovered that Google maintains a feature request forum. Color management is in Issue 143 and in another issue they updated it with the (misguided and bad) idea to ignore color profiles and do everything in sRGB. You can go to the first issue and vote for it.

Is Chrome color managed?

Google released a new very interesting-looking browser called Chrome. It sports some very intriguing features and is based on Apple's WebKit, the code behind Safari. Unfortunately, Chrome is only available for Windows (come on Google!). Also, Google has a very very poor record on the question of color management. Their (windows-only too) picture utility Picasa is not managed. Their web service even strips profiles (horrifying) when you upload images. It is therefore not surprising that Chrome appears to not be color managed, not even using a preference regardless of its WebKit roots. What is it Google? The Stone Age? No color management in a browser is getting ridiculous, especially when you basically get it for free and you're writing one from the ground up. It's even more important with the growing prevalence of wide-gamut LCDs and small-gamut laptop displays and more and more display manufacturers shipping not super correct but usable profiles in their windows drivers. I would be fine with a simple preference (preferably less hidden than that in Firefox). It would be great if somebody could check this out as I don't have a Windows machine.

Update: I checked it on a windows machine and there is no color management anywhere in Chrome. Giant leap backwards indeed. While some of the technology in Chrome is very cool and it does feel fast and I like WebKit being there, this is quite disappointing. But unfortunately, since Picasa is STILL not color managed (and there it really matters a lot even when nobody that uses it calibrates their monitors), I don't think Chrome will ever get color management. A little like Microsoft and their IE.