Is Your Mozilla Browser Displaying the Right Colors?

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I don't know how this happened, but somehow I stumbled on all these pages on color management in Firefox and I found out something interesting, unlike when I usually get lost surfing. It turns out my TenFourFox wasn't quite getting color management right with its stock settings. In fact, most of my browsers were failing the test (the exception being Iceweasel). Unlike the others, however, Firefox has the ability to ensure accurate color management with a little about:config tweak.

First, perform the aforementioned test. Go to BEST FIREFOX TEST PAGE and see if colors are correctly displayed. If they're slightly off, it's because the browser isn't converting untagged images to your monitor's profile. For me, WebKit (on OS X) and QupZilla (on Linux) failed as well as TenFourFox. So to bring full color management to TenFourFox, or any Mozilla browser, go into about:config, then type "gfx.color" in the filter bar to see the color management preferences. Change "gfx.color_management.mode" to 1 (from the default 2). After a restart, TenFourFox will apply color management not just to tagged images, but untagged ones as well.

I'm not sure why Iceweasel passed the test even though it had only partial color management with the default "2" setting, but I'll take it. I'm also not sure why full color management isn't the default. If it's because there's a performance hit, I haven't noticed it. I've been running TenFourFox with full color management enabled and haven't had any problems.

For further reading, check out these links:

Color Management on the Web

How To Enable Color Management in Firefox
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4 comments:

  1. zen8 February 2015 at 07:11

    It certainly is odd that Iceweasel rendered colours properly with the same settings that other Mozilla browsers had. Must be some type of Debian magic I guess. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous11 February 2015 at 06:08

    are there any other settings for that? only 1 and 2? referring to the color management setting of course.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thomas Carlson14 February 2015 at 09:32

    The fact that Iceweasel renders colors properly, as it does on my Quicksilver, is one more indication that PowerPC users should be migrating to Linux. Debian is the way to go.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous11 June 2015 at 09:53

    I set it to 3 and got nice rich color. 1 and 2 are too washed out for me.

    ReplyDelete

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