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Safari introduces better browser colours

Safari's competition isn't standing still. Microsoft wouldn't comment on future colour-support plans for this story, but the company has sunk a lot of time and money into the colour problem.

Microsoft developed scRGB, a wide-gamut colour space that's now an international standard. For example, where sRGB devotes 8 bits of data to describing the red, green and blue colour components for each pixel of an image, scRGB can devote 16 or 32 bits per component and describe the colours with more flexible floating-point numerals instead of just integers.

In addition, Microsoft is pushing a file format called HD Photo that it hopes will become a replacement for the ubiquitous JPEG. HD Photo -- support for which is built into Vista under the format's previous name, Windows Media Photo -- uses the scRGB colour space. Support for other colour spaces in IE is a logical extension of promoting HD Photo.

The open-source Mozilla project is less tight-lipped about its plans for colour profile support.

"I'd love to see it in Firefox 3, and we're working to get it there," Vukicevic said.

It's not certain that Firefox 3, code-named Gran Paradiso will support ICC colour profiles, but there's a patch under development and testing right now, and the goal is to include it, he said. However, if it does ship, colour management is likely to be disabled by default.

"We're hoping to get the feature in for the first beta. At that point, we'll look at they feedback and decide whether to turn it on or off," Vukicevic said. For those who enable colour management but who haven't calibrated their monitors to display standard colours, images will look different, and it's a toss-up whether they'll look better or worse, he said.

Another factor is performance. Enabling colour support degrades Web page display "a few per cent" for normal browsing, he said.

Firefox runs on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. To bring colour support to all those foundations, Firefox uses an open-source colour management engine called Little CMS that can translate from one colour space, such as the one a photo uses, to another, such as the one a monitor uses.

ICC colour support has been a longstanding feature request in Mozilla -- the bug listing for the project initially was filed in 1999. It's been a personal issue for Vukicevic, too: he's a photographer as well as a programmer.

"There's a bunch of us at Mozilla who are amateur photographers," Vukicevic said, and they've "been clamouring for ICC support for quite a while now".