update: mozilla engine and color profiles

I blogged recently about my frustration with browsers, color profiles and online photos. (summary: photos look awful in Camino and Firefox on my Mac). Not suprisingly, turns out this is a big topic of discussion around the world, with people like Joi Ito blogging this as well.

Well the good news is that Bugzilla at Mozilla seems to report that something may be done about this soon (if I read that thread correctly). The original post in that bug is from 1999. That’s insane.

I have to admit though, that my eyes glaze over the finer details when the thread degenerates into the discussion about a million different color profile technologies, image display techniques and advanced display rendering. I don’t want to have to calibrate my monitor and I don’t want a million variable display modes/profiles out there, because that means I can never tell what my photos will look like online.

This is something that really should be simple. I understand that there are complex things behind this issue, but this has gone on too long now. Time to simplify. Convention over configuration. All displays and browsers should ship in a state and configuration similar enough that there is a low variation on image display. Display professionals and color science experts are welcome to deviate for their various requirements. But I don’t want to (not on any of my Macs or Linux boxen) and I don’t want my parent’s Windows PC to deviate either.