Better Pictures in Your Browser
June 20, 2007: Do you spend a lot of time in Flickr, Phanfare, or on other sites looking at other people’s pictures posting your own? Do you want to make them look better? Are you on Windows?
Get Apple’s new web browser for Windows, Safari. According to CNET:
Apple’s Safari may not be rewriting the rules for Web browsing on Windows just yet, but it’s leading the way with one significant change: photographs with better color.
Unlike the prevailing browsers on the Internet–Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox–the Apple browser supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colors. With the beta version of Safari now on Windows, Mac OS X users aren’t the only ones who’ll be able to see the difference.
However, Apple won’t keep that edge for long. Mozilla’s forthcoming Firefox 3 browser, due to ship in beta form this July, likely will include support for richer color, said Vlad Vukicevic, a technical leader at Mozilla and a photo enthusiast.
Together, the moves could help boost the Internet beyond the orbit of the sRGB color scheme, a broadly supported but limited standard initially introduced by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. But it’s not likely that Web photography will achieve sRGB escape velocity until the dominant Internet Explorer also follows suit.
sRGB is fine for most people today, said Brad Hinkel, author of Color Management in Digital Photography and more recently a Microsoft project leader. But it doesn’t encompass the full gamut of colors that the human eye can perceive or that can be displayed on the latest monitors.
“I’ve seen them. They’re knock your socks off, intensely amazing–beautiful, vibrantly rich colors,” Hinkel said. “Getting color management into Safari, into the browser and on the Internet is a great thing.”
I didn’t see any differences on the pages I tried, but the image would have had to have been encoded with a better color profile than most browsers can read, like Adobe RGB.
However, I loaded this test page, and could see the difference then.
Read the whole article here and get Safari here.
Scott
June 21st, 2007 at 2:24 am
Whoa. I left Safari for Camino and have been very happy, but that may make me go back. That test page is pretty dramatic.
June 22nd, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Safari is not very safe browser, and with very few functionalities if you compare with firefox …
June 23rd, 2007 at 5:45 pm
The Safari 3 beta has just been updated to 3.0.2 to address the security flaws found in the first release. If you use the extensions feature of FireFox you will find Safari lacking, but if all you want is a simple browser that is standards compliant give it a try.