Color-managed browsing on Windows: Safari issues

Hello all,

As most of you will undoubtedly know, neither one of the big browsers on the Windows platform (Explorer, Firefox) supports color management. A few months ago, Apple presented a Windows port Safari, its color managed browser, so I decided to give it a try for my photo-related browsing.

At first glance, everything seemed to work fine. For example, the tests on this page (click) indicated no obvious problems. However, I noticed a slight difference in rendering between Photoshop/Lightroom and the browser. Also, when looking my own web site with sRGB images, there was no discernible difference between Safari and Firefox.

From this and other test I have concluded that Safari has only partial support for color management. It recognizes and honors embedded profiles, but it does not transform all images to the monitor space. Instead, every image is transformed to sRGB. Hence, there is an implicit assumption that every monitor is sRGB (wrong). It also means that, for sRGB images, Safari is no better than a 'stupid' browser.

So far, I have only verified this behavior on my own machine, so the appearance of the bug could still be related to my configuration (WinXP MCE with MS color applet installed, Optix XR profile). Can anyone with access to a color-managed Windows machine verify this behavior on another machine? More detailed information on the type of tests I performed can be found in http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1007179

Thanks in advance!

Simon

Simon, it sounds to me like this is working as expected and as designed. The slight diff between PS/LR and Safari can be explained simply by the use of different Color Management Systems and/or rendering intents. The fact that there was no diff between browsers with sRGB makes sense too, as the Firefox/IE would treat everything as sRGB.I'm not sure about how Windows treats sRGB, but I think that with an sRGB image, a CM view and non-CM view should and would be identical. Others here can hopefully confirm this.

KrisCarnmarker said:

The slight diff between PS/LR and Safari can be explained simply by the use of different Color Management Systems and/or rendering intents.

Click to expand...

Kris, this was my initial reaction as well. To test this, I calibrated to a gamma of 1.0 to exaggerate the effect that a monitor profile should have. This obviously made my desktop very bright, but PS and LR compensated accordingly. Safari did not, which leads to the conclusion that the monitor profile is not (properly) used by Safari.

The fact that there was no diff between browsers with sRGB makes sense too, as the Firefox/IE would treat everything as sRGB.I'm not sure about how Windows treats sRGB, but I think that with an sRGB image, a CM view and non-CM view should and would be identical. Others here can hopefully confirm this.

Click to expand...

As far as I know, Firefox and IE don't treat image content as anything, they simply send the RGB numbers to the display. Also, there is no 'overall' color management going on in Windows that converts everything from sRGB to the monitor profile (or any other profile). An sRGB image will look different in a color managed and a non color managed application. Unless your monitor profile is equal to sRGB, that is.

Simon