Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Color-Managing Firefox

In the quest to make the internet make sense, I have learned a way to make Firefox a color-managed browser! Most web browsers ignore color profiles, witch the exception of Safari. As some of you may have noticed, Safari is much better displaying colors correctly than Firefox. However, this is about all that Safari is better at (for instance, Blogger is extremely buggy on Safari, and much better on Firefox). Without getting overly complex here, this all has to do with how the web browser you are using handles embedded ICC profiles. While this solution does not fix the issue for the general Firefox (or other non-color-managed browser user), it does allow me to work on my blog and see a mostly color-accurate image without having two browsers open. Color management is available in Firefox 3, but must be enabled. It is supposed to be done by default in future versions of the browser, which I am looking forward to, for the the sake of my viewers! Below I will list steps on how to convert Firefox 3 to accurately handle ICC profiles, but you can find out more about this by checking out this article...
To convert Firefox:
1. Point your browser (Firefox) to about:config in the URL address bar
2. If a warning message appears, just tell Firefox that you do indeed know what you are doing (even if you don't)
3. Scroll down to gfx.color_management.enabled (or type that in the "Filter" bar at the top to save some time)
4. Double click on gfx.color_management.enabled to change the "Value" column to read "true" instead of the default "false"
5. Have fun looking at images that actually look somewhat like what you uploaded!

Once again, if you have any questions, feel free to let me know!

1 comment:

Carlos said...

Brilliant.
THANK YOU!!!