• Jun
  • 23

Enabling Color Management in Firefox 3

Rejoice, for Firefox 3 hath come down upon us! You might have caught my raving about it on LightroomForums. Not only did Mozilla speed up the browser tremendously, but they also fixed the bug that caused Flash content to flicker nasty-like when loaded into modal boxes — a long-standing peeve of mine.

In addition to these, Mozilla has reported roughly 15,000 bug fixes and improvements in Firefox 3. One of the most important improvements for photographers is the addition of support for color management (as if Firefox weren’t sexy enough already!). But color management is disabled by default, so, if you want to use it, you’ll have to turn it on. Here’s how:

In the Awesome Bar, type: about:config. Click through the warning, then filter the list for gfx.color_management.enabled. You’ll see that it’s set to false. Right-click and Toggle. Restart Firefox and enjoy the web in all of its color managed glory.

Color management is a standard technique defined by the International Color Consortium to ensure consistent color presentation for images across of variety of physical and digital display types. While Firefox 2 ignored images’ ICC profiles, Firefox 3 uses them to tune the image to your display to more accurately reproduce the original scene in your browser.

Thanks to Mark Sirota for pointing out the enabling process in the forums.

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Matthew
23 June 08 / link / feed

And only a short while after blogging this, I find it’s been done on LightroomNews.

DigitalOxygen.ca
24 June 08 / link / feed

Now if only the average user had Firefox 3 and has turned this feature on. Sadly this means very little in the grand scheme of things because while we as photographer can see our pictures the way they were meant to be seen very few if any of our visitors will ever see them that way. Not only will it take many months for most Firefox users to get to version 3 but I suspect very few of those user will turn on color management.

Even if 100% of all Firefox users were using version 3 and had color management turned on that still only accounts for roughly 1/2 of all visitors (give or take) so until all browsers are color managed and have that on be default we are no better of than we were before… at least not much better. :-(

Matthew
24 June 08 / link / feed

In general, I think Firefox users are more aware then IE users that browsers need to be upgraded. I don’t think it will take nearly as long for users to transition from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, as it’s taken IE users to transition from version 6 to 7.

My stats would seem to agree. Mint is showing 58% of my visitors on Firefox; broken into two groups, 30% using Firefox 3 and 27% using Firefox 2. This soon after release, those are impressive figures.

You do have a point, however, that most people will not have the option enabled. Most won’t even know it’s an option, and of the people who do know, most probably won’t realize the significance of such an option.

I do believe, however, that Safari also supports color management. I’m not sure whether it’s enabled by default, but hopefully the other browsers will catch on soon.

Adam
3 July 08 / link / feed

I think it is all-for-not as most people do not have a properly colour calibrated display. The theory behind it is good, and only the most tech savvy will reap the benefits of it. Not the average Joe that comes to our sites looking at our photo work.

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