Mozilla Firefox 3 for Mac and Windows, which was released at 10AM Pacific today, is the latest web browser to support the colour managed display of photos with embedded ICC profiles. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s turned off by default. Here’s how to turn it on.
Firefox’s Preferences dialog doesn’t include a switch you can flip to enable or disable colour management, so you’ll have to work a bit harder than ought to be necessary to bring this capability to life.
The steps are:
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.
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.
On Macs running OS X 10.5.2 and 10.5.3 here, that’s all that’s required to switch on colour managed photo display. Firefox 3 also gives the option of selecting a display profile, but the program should – and does here on the Mac – automatically honour the display profile selected in the system, so it isn’t necessary in this case to set or change gfx.color_management.display_profile.
As of right now, Firefox 3 isn’t showing up in the Software Update feature of a release candidate of the program, while the various Mozilla web domains appear to be overloaded with traffic, so it may be some time yet before the new release can be pulled down from the web. But I downloaded successfully at 9:00 PM today.
