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).

News wants to be free

The death of NBC news anchor Tim Russert on June 13 was reported on Wikipedia 38 minutes after it happened. This was also 38 minutes before it was officially reported by NBC’s Tom Brokaw.

The traditional news agencies have a tradition of not reporting things like this before the family can be notified. Citizen journalists on the web have no such tradition. If something noteworthy occurs it will find its way quickly and inexorably into public view on the internet.

The person responsible for the Wikipedia update was fired. I’m sure this isn’t the first time somebody with good journalistic instincts and bad bosses has been canned for this sort of thing, just as I’m sure it won’t be the last. Nevertheless, no matter how tightly the traditional keepers of the news try to control that news, the news will get free.

Google punishes AdWords advertisers with slow loading pages

Google recently announced that they have begun factoring page load times into quality scores for keywords in their AdWords program. What this mean is that advertisers with slow-loading landing pages will pay more per visit they receive via their AdWords ads.

Without sounding too much like a socialist, this is good for the web. Encouraging website stakeholders to build lightweight, quick-loading sites is often tricky — getting proportionately harder the farther removed the stakeholders are from the build process. This move by Google speaks in a language these stakeholders understand most clearly — the bottom line.

It’s only a matter of time before Google starts penalizing sites’ PageRank (a measure of a site’s ranking within their search engine) for slow-loading, poorly-optimized pages.

Can I get an amen?

Come Get’cha Some

Firefox 3 is available today. Go get it. You know you want to.