Color Profiles and Firefox 3

At long last, Firefox now has the ability to honor ICC profiles,* allowing it to correctly display any image tagged with a color profile. This allows you to view photos, your own and others’, with colors the maker intended.

Here’s how to enable it:

Type about: config in the address bar and then set gfx.color_management.enabled to true.

If you’ve ever seen the colors in a photo become very flat when viewed in a web browser, while they were perfectly vivid in Photoshop, you’ve seen the result of a browser not being ICC-aware. Your photo was probably tagged with the Adobe RGB (1998) ICC profile, but your non ICC-aware web browser just treated it like it was sRGB. (I still recommend that you designate all photos destined for the web with sRGB.)

* ICC profiles define the color palette an image should be displayed with. Commonly used ICC profiles are sRBG and Adobe RGB (1998).