Underexposed

Mozilla has released a third beta version of Firefox 3, bringing about 1,300 changes to the widely used open-source Web browser.

Firefox 3 Beta 3 should be more stable, perform faster, use memory more efficiently, and fit in better on various operating systems than its predecessors, Mozilla said.

Beta 3 of Firefox 3, shown here running on Windows XP, uses new interface elements made of vector graphics. It helps improve performance, Mozilla said.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Having tried the new version out for a while this morning, my top impression hasn't changed since beta 2: the best thing about the new version is faster performance. Pages load faster.

Other improvements, according to the Firefox 3 release notes, include a better tool for seeing who owns a Web site; better protection against sites known to install viruses, spyware, or other malicious software; the plugging of 350 memory leaks that previously could waste more and more computer memory; the ability to locate downloaded files; a better tool to find and install plug-ins; and , now enabled by default.

The new Firefox beta can be downloaded from the Mozilla Web site, including versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux localized for several languages.

The new Firefox beta also adopts more of the native style of Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Linux--the latter having been a point of some contention earlier given some technical difficulties. Also interesting from an interface standpoint and giving the beta a new look is the use of vector graphics for elements such as the back arrow and reload button.

I like Firefox 3's new location bar drop-down feature, in which Firefox presents various sites I've visited or bookmarked. For example, typing "can" retrieves a list that includes various Canon Web sites I've visited as well as Icanhascheezburger.com. (Alas, though, everyone's favorite LOLcats site seems to have a rendering problem with the new browser in the form of 10 "favorite" buttons.)

Beta 3 apparently improves the "frecency" formula that selects what to display in the drop-down list based on how frequently and recently you visited the sites. My only beef with the location bar drop-down so far is that it's a visually chaotic jumble of URLs, favicons, and titles in different fonts and colors.

Coincidentally, I was able to give the new Firefox 3 beta a short stress test, and it fared much better than its predecessor.

I found a misbehaving Flash ad Tuesday that made Firefox 2 chew up about 98 percent of my CPU power and thereby caused my system--especially Firefox--to slow to a crawl. Today, I found that same ad on another Web site while trying the Firefox 3 beta, and although it, too, maxed out my CPU, Firefox now was usable, though sluggish.

Firefox 3 sports a new add-on manager to find, add, disable, and uninstall plug-ins.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

There are some reasons I won't be moving full time to the new beta, though.

Unsurprisingly, given warnings in the release notes, several plug-ins I use still aren't compatible: Foxmarks, del.icio.us, Fotofox, and FireFTP. And Yahoo Mail only can be used in its older classic mode for me.

For the Yahoo Mail problem, there's some hope: Mozilla is waiting on Yahoo for a bug fix for the mail site, and the Firefox release notes now offer a less pessimistic warning that the newer Yahoo Mail interface "may not work for all users right away."

The release notes also warn that Windows Live Mail doesn't work; a plug-in must be installed to play Windows Media Player content on Windows; Firefox often will stop responding to keystrokes when using Google Documents on Mac OS X; and printing is broken on many versions of Linux.

For a computer, dealing with color is just another math problem. And Microsoft wants to change the way your PC counts.

This image shows overexposed highlights, a common problem with digital photography. Look below to see some image-editing results.

(Credit: Microsoft/Bill Crow)

The company has developed a color space--a way to encode colors as numbers a computer can process--called scRGB. If the company succeeds in getting it to catch on, the technology could help add depth and richness to photos taken with digital cameras and viewed on a computer or TV screen.

Today's cameras and computers usually employ a color space called sRGB, developed in the 1990s by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, that describes colors as a particular combination of red, green, and blue. But sRGB is limited both in the breadth of colors it can display and in the subtlety of the tonal shades that separate bright from dark, and scRGB is designed to lift those limits.

The sRGB goal was to make Web page colors more consistent from one computer to the next, and it succeeded at that, said Bill Crow, who has led Microsoft's HD Photo effort to improve digital imagery and who has just been named group manager of the company's Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon imaging effort. But it's designed to match the performance only of decade-old CRT monitors, which fall short of the spectrum of hues that human eyes can distinguish and that newer monitors can display, he said.

"The challenge of sRGB is that it's a subset of the total color space. We are discarding colors when we encode...into sRGB," Crow said. "ScRGB would allow a richer saturated red value...than the sRGB limit for red."

The human eye is good at discerning the subtleties of shadows even on a sunny day, but not so digital cameras, monitors, and file formats such as JPEG. And although most people aren't discontent with the state of image display on their computers, digital photography is exposing limits of sRGB for experts, enthusiasts, and even ordinary photographers trying to edit their photos.

Boosting HDR
The shortcomings of today's technology are particularly glaring for one burgeoning photography technique taking root among enthusiasts, high-dynamic range, or HDR, photography. This technique merges multiple photos taken at different exposures into a single shot whose tonal range can accommodate the brightest brights, the darkest darks, and everything in between.

The left image shows how JPEG, with its narrow dynamic range, sometimes loses data when edited to correct for overexposure. The right HD Photo image, encoded with scRGB, has more range, so highlights can be recovered better.

(Credit: Microsoft/Bill Crow)

The first problem is the initial photos can't manage the whole dynamic range. The second is that once the HDR image is created, computer monitors can't display it the way a human eye would see it. Instead, HDR today involves a process called "tone mapping" to pick which shades to display or not. The result can be halos around dark areas and other peculiarities.

"Dealing with HDR information in general right now is challenging, because you can't see it on your monitor," said Kevin Connor, senior director of product management for Adobe's digital imaging group. "Until the display technologies pick up, it's hard for the average person to actually make broad use of it."

For the more mainstream case of photo editing, Crow said, scRGB can help bring about a future in which a washed-out patch of white in a photo can be corrected to recover different gradations of brightness.

How scRGB works
The scRGB color space is an extension of sRGB, Crow said, and colors such as black or 100 percent green looks the same with either. What's different with scRGB is that it can extend farther--well beyond the colors that can be seen by the human eye--and subdivide more finely than sRGB.

ScRGB can lavish double or even quadruple the number of bits of data used to describe each pixel. And it can use not only integers but also floating-point numbers that enable much narrower steps on the path from light to dark.

ScRGB isn't just an academic idea. It's been a royalty-free standard (click for PDF) since 2003 and therefore is "free for anyone to use," Crow said. But the more likely impetus for adoption is that scRGB support is built into Windows Vista and into the HD Photo file format Microsoft is working to standardize as JPEG XR.

If Microsoft succeeds in getting HD Photo to catch on as JPEG XR, it could help carry scRGB beyond the PC.

"I absolutely expect scRGB support in cameras to accompany JPEG XR," Crow said. One sRGB weakness is that it's designed to be an "output-referred" color space--one geared specifically for showing information on displays. In contrast, scRGB is also designed for input devices such as cameras and processing such as Windows Vista's image-handling mechanism.

Chipmakers have already implemented the technology in camera image processors, but Crow wouldn't estimate when that technology might make it to market.

Recording more data per pixel makes for larger file sizes, but Microsoft argues that the space is regained when using its scRGB-compatible image file format, HD Photo, which has roughly twice the compression efficiency as today's JPEG standard.

With fewer colors and smaller numbers, sRGB may sound simpler to deal with, but those limits bring complications.

"The smaller the color space, the bigger the color-management problem," Connor said. "Each device has different set of trade-offs about which colors it's trying to capture and which it says it's not going to bother with."

For example, to best use sRGB's maximum of 256 levels of brightness, computers were adapted to put the gradations where people are most sensitive to their presence: in the shadows. A mathematical parameter called "gamma" determines the location of the midpoint on the curve from dark to bright and therefore where the shades of gray show up. But not every software package and computer monitor is set up with the same gamma setting.

In contrast, scRGB ignores gamma altogether, evenly dividing the tonal gradations. That simplifies the mathematical operations of image-editing software, Crow said.

Slow transitions
Another color space, AdobeRGB, gradually has caught on as an alternative that can show a wider gamut of colors than sRGB. But it illustrates a challenge of getting a new color space to catch on: it's supported generally only in higher-end cameras, and most software, such as the current versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox, can't handle it. An image on the Web that's encoded with AdobeRGB looks drained of color unless you're viewing it with Apple's Safari browser.

AdobeRGB caught on in part through the success of Photoshop, the king of the image-editor mountain. Photoshop 5 introduced the color space as a way to accommodate blue colors used in printing that weren't described by sRGB, Connor said.

Microsoft lacks Adobe's imaging clout, but possesses a different power: Windows. "Any time you have Microsoft endorsing a standard," said Erik Willey, director of product marketing for desktop displays at monitor maker ViewSonic, "then it's got momentum behind it."