Mozilla Firefox 3
for Mac and Windows, which was released at 10AM Pacific today, is the
latest web browser to support the color-managed display of photos with
embedded ICC profiles. That’s the good news.
The bad news is it’s
turned off by default. This is how to turn it on:
Firefox’s Preferences dialog doesn’t include a
switch you can flip to enable or disable colour management, so you’ll
have to a few steps to enable this.
1. Type about:config in Firefox 3’s address bar and press Return. The configuration settings will appear.
2. In the Filter field, type gfx. The list of settings will shorten to show just those related to graphics, ie gfx
3. If the Value for gfx.color_management.enabled is False double-click anywhere on that line to toggle the setting to True.
Quit and relaunch Firefox 3 and you’re in business. You can confirm that colour management is working by viewing the photos on this page.
If all four quadrants of the first photo are a seamless match, then
color management in your copy of Firefox is up and running.
On Macs running OS X 10.5.2 and 10.5.3 here,
that’s all that’s required to switch on color-managed photo display.
Firefox 3 also gives the option of selecting a display profile, but the
program should - and does here on the Mac - automatically honor the
display profile selected in the system, so it isn’t necessary in this
case to set or change gfx.colormanagement.display_profile.
So, grab the latest version of this great browser, and modify these settings to maximize your photo viewing experience!