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December 12, 2006
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Safari's competition isn't standing still. Microsoft wouldn't comment on future color-support plans for this article, but the company has sunk a lot of time and money into the color problem.
Microsoft developed scRGB, a wide-gamut color space that's now an international standard. For example, where sRGB devotes 8 bits of data to describing the red, green and blue color components for each pixel of an image, scRGB can devote 16 or 32 bits per component and describe the colors 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 color space. Supporting other color spaces in IE is a logical extension of promoting HD Photo.
The open-source Mozilla project is less tight-lipped about its plans for color 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 color profiles. But there is a patch under development and testing right now, Vukicevic said, and the goal is to include it. If it does ship, though, color management likely will be disabled by default.
"We're hoping to get the feature in for the first beta. At that point, we'll look at the feedback and decide whether to turn it on or off," Vukicevic said. For those who enable color management but who haven't calibrated their monitors to display standard colors, images will look different. And it's a toss-up whether they'll look better or worse, he said.
Another factor is performance. Enabling color support degrades Web page display "a few percent" for normal browsing, he said.
Firefox runs on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. To bring color support to all those foundations, Firefox uses an open-source color management engine called Little CMS that can translate from one color space, such as the one a photo uses, to another, such as the one a monitor uses.
ICC color 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 clamoring for ICC support for quite a while now."
See more CNET content tagged:
margin, color, Apple Safari, Adobe Systems Inc., Web browser
utilizes it.
Anywayz...
Better late than never, so whenever the *dominant* browsers add
this basic technology, I say "Welcome to the club".
:-)
Sounds great, but it's not going to make me switch to Safari. I don't take my flickr browsing THAT seriously. And, I'm not too keen on the idea of getting sucked into the world of 'Safari Standards'. (Mind you, I understand that the world of IE standards - or Mozilla standards for that matter - are no better in moral principal, but at least the majority of websites conform to them. That's worth something, if you ask me.)
That said, it's kind of cool that more people are made aware of it if they intend to build websites, so at least the idea of color coordination and visual appeal can be refined and clarified.
/P
It really doesn't matter what OS, what video card, or what the image is if the monitor you're working with isn't calibrated. I don't think people even KNOW they can calibrate them or how to do so. Geeks, sure, we know how to do it or that it can be done at all in the first place. The average user? I seriously doubt it.
to RGB difference, especially when an image is tagged with an
ICC profile.
I make my living in the field of color management and correction
for the book industry and often distribute tagged PDF files in
this manner.
This is a very important change for the business community in
terms of improving brand "look/feel" consistency in sales and
marketing efforts.
Even if inconsistencies exist between monitors (and they do)
OVERALL color fidelity is vastly improved and this is what
matters to business, creative and ecommerce clients.
For the average home user, it's true that this develop is a bit less
important.
Fix the window resize along the edges first....THAT is something you hear LOUD AND CLAER a lot.
What a joke....if Apple cant win....they create a new category to win in. Browser colors....dam that is lame.
Safari looks great, when it works... but this beta version is by far the worst of all beta version software that I put on my laptop. You can't really try it since it crashes most of the time and sometimes you get one text line information "Safari doesn't have information..." insted of page. This is more like alpha, I don't know why Apple did this in rush? Guys, your iPhone looks great, Safari also, take time and make it right.
BR,
Vladimir
incomplete software that's in a testing phase. lol
If they get that figured out (and decrease the overall memory footprint), I'll switch back. It is WAY faster than either IE or FF and looks nicer too.
experience is superior to your archaic XP or Vista.
While that won't be any more effective than what you're doing now, it WILL be much more entertaining for everyone else to watch.
In addition, speaking of colors - it's d-mn ugly! The color schema is a white dog on a Vista desktop.
If I wanted a Mac, I'd a bought one. I bought an Alienware Sentia running Vista; I'd like my browser not to be the thing that looks like an 'Alien'. Ugh.
Apple made the color scheme of Safari so hideous on Vista. I
installed it on my Vista partition, and it is just way too dark and
muddy looking, not nearly as light and clean as it looks in OS X. I
don't think it's just a matter of monitor calibration either.
Apple needs to make it look a lot nicer before bringing it out of
beta.
development, game production, book publishing, photo share and
printing sites, and sales, marketing and PR, there are many millions
of people across the world who care very much.
see things as they were intented? That attitude is quite telling.
Remember that every Mac user is so because they use or have used
Windows...basically there is no other reason. The whole experience
is something else on Macintosh. So if you like to bash Mac without
actually really using one and I don't mean piddling around with one
at BestBuy, then you have nothing to say about what sucks and
what doesn't. Ask any Mac user if they would go back to
Windows..."never!" is probably what you will hear.
Note: I know many more ex-Mac users than ex-Windows users, and I haven't known one to go back yet.
What if we find that your monitor isn't calibrated 100% accurate? Whose fault is that? I wouldn't be so quick to blame the OS or the video card or even the users of another OS. I might want to look at the monitor itself- or are you wiling to settle and call it 'good enough'?
This is a big deal to only a few users but it doesn't mean it's not needed, only that it's not going to be a huge improvement noticed by millions.
to RGB difference, especially when an image is tagged with an
ICC profile.
I make my living in the field of color management and correction
for the book industry and often distribute tagged PDF files in
this manner.
This is a very important change for the business community in
terms of improving brand "look/feel" consistency in sales and
marketing efforts.
A poor quality POS picture will *STILL* be a poor quality POS picture, but now in a few more colors that your eye can't detect and weren't in the original image file in the first place.
Perhaps if they introduce iSmell, then they can add something new. I must warn you though, some parts of the Net would need odor filters.
data.
JPG color space at 72 DPI is basically the same as the color space
of a JPG at higher resolutions. This is the value of JPG. Unless
the user reduces the color space, the color gamut remains very
close.
Therefore, this browser color change is still very relevant for
online shoppers, business professionals preserving brand
identity in proofing, book publishers, marketing and sales
professionals and for those in dental and medical imaging.
I know, I do this exact thing every day, 5 days a week.
And we are not talking "a few more colors here." This is a very
misleading generalization. Having an RGB color space tagged
with an ICC profile is a HUGE improvement over sRGB.
Huge.
Dan, your posts have matured and you have become a man of
facts: don't fail your evolution now by resorting to half educated
generalizations.
Dante
>> Mac browsers have been color manged (this is the term to use, btw C|Net) for years. Not just Safari. It's native to the OS, but it's also native for applications like Photoshop, Illustrators and others on PCs.
So, you really think that there's no color profile management on Windows, and applications like PhotoShop, Illustrators and others on non-Mac platforms, right?
I won't correct you, frankly. Your brain deserved to be manipulated by Steve Jobs.
OS X manages color on a system level and system wide with any application that is ICC profile aware. It can also communicate with devices like digital cameras and displays. If it is a digital display, OS X will create an acceptable profile for it. It can always be tweaked.
Take the time to understand how each OS handles color management and you will see the difference. They are working on a solution for Vista so that it can manage color better. Then you will probably see IE someday have the ability to read and understand color tags.
Even though we Mac users may be very ignorant, OS X is very smart.
the Adobe Suite and other Apps.
IE does not however.
Safari does.
If you understand color management, you know this to be true.
Reread the article.
why IE is better. Just face it Microsoft is dead. No one cares about
them any more. Its been knocked off its pedestal by a company
that gives a rip about usability vs. profit margins.
Safari for Windows seems to be doing just fine at reading and
commenting on this article.
that is causing the problems. I'm running Safari 3.0.1 on
Windows XP Pro SP2, on a Dell Latitude D820. 256MB of Video
RAM, 2 GB of RAM. Its a development box so I'm running all
kinds of other crap on it.
I'm having no issues with running it on my system. Are you
running the latest version of QuickTime? I don't think that
should make a difference, but I already had it installed on my XP
system and have not tried to install it on a system without
QuickTime.
I don't have a Vista box to test it out on. But I'm not surprised if
you have issues with it on Vista. Not because of Safari but
because of all the software compatibility issues I've heard Vista
has.
Just my two cents.
Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop.
I have had a couple of hangups,
but they have yet to reach the count of six yet. There
are bugs.
However, this is the first report I've heard
of transposed characters. The only way, what you to describe, to
even be possible, would for the text rendering engine to be
changing ASCII, and UNICODE bytes by one bit. This problem
would have been reported universally. Nice try,
however I cannot possibly know whether or not the rest of what
you said to be true.
It's not really the colors--they're show up okay. But at least from what I'm seeing, there's a lot of compression artifacts and blurriness. To be honest, it looks more like a badly color-profiled GIF image, than one with millions of colors.
So, based solely on what I'm seeing here, I don't see how this would be better than your typical sRGB JPEG.
the website they have divided it into four different images (the
quadrants) and applied different compression standards to each
quadrant.
Its not expected that the image would like perfect/flawless when
rendered in Safari just that the colors would render correctly.
Each compression algorithm is going to change the image
slightly. I think that some of these algorithms are going to look
better at different resolutions and are not intended to be blown
up to that large a scale.
Which makes sense because you don't want to load large images
into your web browser, at the same time you do not want to
lose the color quality and clarity when compressing the images
into smaller file sizes for the web.
The example is setup just to show how the color is preserved
using the different compression types. Keeping the image
sharpness and clarity falls under a different set of functionality.
I think that would make for a good store as to how well the
different compressions formats render in terms of sharpness,
clarity, and speed under Safari vs the other browsers.
However, Safari on windows is decent. Firefox will be better on the
crappy PC. I think that this was a bad idea on Apple's part by
releasing Safari for windows. Why not invest more time to make
Safari even better on the Mac, that way maybe people will switch,
bringing in the $$$$$$$$$$$$
platforms. They are making modifications in tandem with
Windows.
What is sad is that you all act like this is the first time Apple has
ever ported an application to Windows. They have had multiple
successes including AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro, QuickTime,
iTunes, and Bonjour for Windows. All of which seem to work
fine on Windows. Why do so many of you have so little faith that
the final product is going to be something good.
Nobody is asking you all to pay for it, or forcing you to download
it. You all act like Apple but a gun to your head and said
download it or else.
Instead of ******** you all should be thanking them for giving
you options, options that you don't have to pay for.
- Could care less about the colours
- by jatos June 20, 2007 3:35 AM PDT
- I use to Safari, and I couldn't care less about the colours.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (135 Comments)The reason I like is because it is so fast.
When I was using it outstripped FF an IE7 in terms of speed, and thats what brought me over to it.