When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also. ~Paul Cezanne

We all know that Apple/Mac is more of a designers machine and for a long time Firefox targeted Windows/Linux users. Safari the official Mac browser (also available for windows) was one of the browsers in the market that supported color managed display of photos with embedded ICC profiles.

Good news for the Firefox fans is that this feature (color managed display of photo) is now available with the Firefox 3 version. Bad news however is that it’s disabled by default. Sometimes actions defy logic and having this feature disables is a classic example of this. I can’t understand why this feature is disable by default. Following are two images, first snapshot is taken using Internet Explorer 8 which does not support color managed display of photo and the second is snapshot of same photo on Firefox 3 for which I have enabled color managed display of photo.

You can enable this feature in Firefox 3 using two methods (Courtesy Rob Galbraith [1. Firefox 3, released today, supports colour managed web browsing]).

Method 1 (Manual Method)

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.
4. 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 colour management in your copy of Firefox is up and running.

Method 2 (Using an extension)

Install the Color Management add-on Once installed, enabling and disabling colour management is as simple as checking a check-box and relaunching Firefox 3. The add-on, currently at v0.4, can be downloaded here (free registration required).

To my surprise even Opera 9.50 is not having this feature. I thought opera was the most complaint browser when it comes to abiding by standards.