Color profiling does not only pertain to photography, it’s important for (web) design as well. If you find yourself adding adjustment layers to comps in Photoshop, exporting 100x until you finally match somewhat the same tone in the browser as well, then you will understand why “dumb” browsers should be a thing of the past.

Whether one has a calibrated monitor is a whole other story… belonging to other (yet) uncontrollable factors like display specs, quality, lifetime, viewing environment, etc. Since there is at least one factor that can be controlled in the color consistency chain to provide better viewing experiences and workflows, then why would you omit it? Again, I do not understand why would you build in a new feature and not turn it on by default?? I repeat, NO ONE will turn it on (apart from the few that specifically search for the reason why FF3 is displaying it wrong and they specifically know that it supposed to be right in FF3). Hence, the feature just simply doesn’t exist.

But I give you that, why am I ranting about? As long as Flash doesn’t know how to handle color profiles, it may be as well FF4 until this is turned on by default…

Let’s ask ourselves, who the heck cares about color profiles? Obviously only the professionals that care about their images looking right to as many people as possible. But is the average John Doe going to know what a color profile is or would he even care? All he wants to see is an image and that better looks right! The average user is NEVER even gonna come up with the idea that the image could look better if he had something like a color profile capable display tool. It’s even unlikelier than NEVER that this user is gonna look for some geeky config code to turn it on!

This is just the most pointless feature of FF3! If this is not turned on by default, it will NEVER EVER be used by the average user! Or do you expect that the professionals only show their work to other professionals that understand color profiles? No!!! – I can’t believe it, I’m so frustrated right now… Finally I thought things would start to look better when FF3 finally supports it (IE sometime with version 8 or 9 maybe) but no, it’s like not supporting it at all!

“Color management is turned off by default to prevent subtle color variations affecting the overall look of web sites.” Really? Ever designed a website? As probably most professionals use Photoshop (which supports color profiles) to design sites, a website “would” look EXACTLY the same if opened in a browser that supports color profiles. Well, in FF & IE not so much!

The most basic thing a browser needs to do, is; display information! How about displaying the information CORRECTLY? (without the user having to configure anything!) Back to work, Mozilla… Take some hints from Apple’s Safari.

Thanks, FF team!

-a