June 19, 2007 4:00 AM PDT
Safari ushers in better browser colors
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Unlike the prevailing browsers on the Internet--Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox--the Apple browser supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colors. With the beta version of Safari now on Windows, Mac OS X users aren't the only ones who'll be able to see the difference.
However, Apple won't keep that edge for long. Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3 browser, due to ship in beta form this July, likely will include support for richer color, said Vlad Vukicevic, a technical leader at Mozilla and a photo enthusiast.
Together, the moves could help boost the Internet beyond the orbit of the sRGB color scheme, a broadly supported but limited standard initially introduced by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. But it's not likely that Web photography will achieve sRGB escape velocity until the dominant Internet Explorer also follows suit.
A color test for browsers
People can see whether their browser properly supports color profiles by visiting an International Color Consortium Web page that shows a specially constructed image.
This first image tests whether your browser supports different ways of encoding color information. The four quarters of the image each are encoded with a different color profile: sRGB for the upper left, YCC-RGB for the upper right, GBR for the lower left and Adobe RGB for the lower right.
If your browser doesn't support International Color Consortium (ICC) color profiles, the scene looks like this.
If your browser supports ICC color profiles, the scene looks like this.
Credit: International Color Consortium
sRGB is fine for most people today, said Brad Hinkel, author of Color Management in Digital Photography and more recently a Microsoft project leader. But it doesn't encompass the full gamut of colors that the human eye can perceive or that can be displayed on the latest monitors.
"I've seen them. They're knock your socks off, intensely amazing--beautiful, vibrantly rich colors," Hinkel said. "Getting color management into Safari, into the browser and on the Internet is a great thing."
sRGB alternatives
Although the vast majority of images on the Web are encoded with sRGB, alternatives such as Adobe RGB, the European Color Intiaitive's ECI RGB and Microsoft's scRGB can display a broader palette of colors.
For now, there's little point employing the more sophisticated color schemes on the Web. IE, Firefox and Opera can't display them, and worse, Adobe RGB images, for example, typically look worse than sRGB on the Web. That's because the non-Safari browsers, incorrectly interpreting an Adobe RGB image as sRGB, drain the images of some of their color.
Not so with Safari. Apple machines are in widespread use among graphics professionals, and the operating system supports color encoding schemes that are called profiles and are standardized by a group called the International Color Consortium (ICC). Safari checks to see whether an image is tagged with a particular ICC color profile and displays it accordingly, tuned to work with the user's monitor.
While average Web surfers aren't likely to notice much of a difference, some professional photographers do care about the issue. For example, those selling images over the Web as stock art want them to look as good as possible, but they often encode their images as sRGB to make them appear better on the screens of potential purchasers.
People can see whether their browser properly supports color profiles by visiting an ICC Web page that shows a specially constructed image. With color support, the image appears to be a desert formation against a blue sky; without color support, it's a checkerboard of garishly distorted hues.
Color on computers is a complicated business, given the wide variety and near-infinite combinations of video cards, displays, printers, ink and cameras. ICC profiles can bring order to some of the chaos while preserving a bit more of the richness of color that human eyes can perceive.
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utilizes it.
Anywayz...
Better late than never, so whenever the *dominant* browsers add
this basic technology, I say "Welcome to the club".
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
experience is superior to your archaic XP or Vista.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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 $$$$$$$$$$$$
- Could care less about the colours
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by jatos
June 20, 2007 3:35 AM PDT
- I use to Safari, and I couldn't care less about the colours.
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Reply to this comment
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See all 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.