firefox 3.0 coming - with color management

The news reports indicate that Firefox 3.0 will be officially released next

week, on Tuesday June 17, 2008.

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,147039-c,mozilla/article.html

 

One of the most photo.net relevant reasons to install and use Firefox 3.0 is its

support for ICC profile color managed image display.

 

To enable Firefox 3.0 color management, do the following:

 

- enter 'about:config' in the firefox address bar

 

- type 'gfx' in the filter field to limit its display to relevant entries.

 

- double click the - gfx.color_management.enabled - entry and its value will

change to true.

 

- double click the - gfx.color_management.display_profile - entry and a text

input field will appear. Paste the file location string below, or another

similar one with the desired ICC profile, into the field.

 

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Color\Profiles\Recommended\sRGB Color Space

Profile.icm

 

The profile file location above is only one of many possible locations for these

files on a Windows machine. To locate them on your system, simply perform a file

search for '*.icm' to generate a list of ICC profiles on your system.

Anyone who shares their work online or sends clients to web-based galleries and proofs will still want to double check all of their work on a non-profiled browser. The vast majority of people are still a long, long way from viewing images with color management engaged. Even the people currently using Firefox, and inclined to keep it up to date, will not generally be aware of the rather cryptic process mentioned above. Why the FF dev guys don't expose this sort of thing through a pleasant GUI that non-nerds can actually use, I'll never know. It's one of the foibles of the open-source culture, I think.

 

Still, this is indeed good news. If I pop open the laptop to show someone some work, it will be nice to know that I can point a browser at a gallery I've got somewhere, and not sweat over whether or not they were rendered in sRGB.

There is also a plug-in available for Firefox 3.0 that provides a GUI interface for changing the color management settings.

 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6891

 

Even without the plug-in, the process for changing the settings, described in my original post, was accomplished in a few seconds.

I believe Safari already has this feature.

It's true, Paul, it does. And if you look through theads, here, you'll be shocked at how many people who work on a Mac, and prepare their own online images, and surf to them using Safari... end up being shocked at how horrible their work looks to most other people when then finally get on another machine for a look-see (the problem, of course, being images that aren't adaptd to the sRGB space). Having a browser that supports profiles isn't all it's cracked up to be... not until the vast majority of your intended audience ALSO has the same. In the meantime, you have to take the lowest common denominator into account.

And what Matt said above is exactly why the feature is disabled by default and

quietly tucked away through about:config for now.

Not to insult Paul or anything, this post in NOT about Safari, its about Firefox, its kind of obvious as the post reads "Firefox 3.0"

 

Now Firefox 3 is already available on Unix and Linux systems, and yes it works fine and yes you have to do it manually through the text based configuration. I use the "colormatch" profile from adobe's icc bundle. This would be more user friendly if it had a plug-in gui, not the experimental one, but a working decent one.

How could you possibly take into account nonprofiled displays? They will vary all over the place. I think this will remain so forever since most people won't be measuring their screens.

<I>"....Firefox 3 is already available on Unix and Linux systems</I><P>I have been

using Firefox 3 beta on a Macintosh for a couple of months and it works

great.<P>"....work on a Mac, and prepare their own online images........images that

aren't adaptd to the sRGB space"</I><P>That isn't just a Macintosh problem, being

that sRGB is platform agnostic, but an operator not saving as sRGB regardless of

the Operating System used. If one is using Photoshop "Save for Web" then the

"Standard Windows Color" box should be check, regardless of what OS one is

using. Also if one is using the latest PS version then "Save as sRGB" can be made

the default in "SFW".<P>I do all my web work on a Macintosh but also have a white

box PC, with a non calibratedd monitor, using XP, IE and Firefox for checking things

out and my web images are very close on the Windows box, even in the infamous

Internet Explorer.

I have a kind of off topic question about CM....

 

Will the browser support color spaces other than sRGB? If so, would it make sense to put images up in say, ProPhoto RGB even though it doesn't display in IE?

"Will the browser support color spaces other than sRGB? If so, would it make sense to put images up in say, ProPhoto RGB even though it doesn't display in IE?"

 

I think that's the entire function of browser-based color management as discussed in this thread- you won't be limited to sRGB anymore. The problem- unless all your users are using CM aware browsers your images may look quite poor on many systems. So I guess you can create two versions, one for each browser (welcome to the bad old days) or just continue to use sRGB.

Enrique, if you don't intend to insult...please be more careful how you word your responses. I'm well aware of the

post topic, I simply wanted to point out (in 7 words or less) that Safari also had this function. Perhaps my use of

the word "already" instead of "also" came off as an attack on Firefox, which of course it is not. Matt is correct to

point out the additional complexities this implies for users. Please don't be too quick to criticize folks for

providing insight; even if it is a bit off-topic, it may still be relevant.

Remember that you have to close Firefox and restart it for the changes in about:config to take effect.

You can check whether color management is working correctly by viewing this page before and after you change the configuration:

 

http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

One year later, we have it, and so what? Nobody in their right mind would make a website requiring color-managed browsers. Embedded color profiles make JPEG files unnecessarily large, like the silly embedded thumbnail. Referred color profiles make sense, but no standard URLs exist, do they?