As discussed in the recent post [Firefox 3.5 – ICC Profile Support]/firefox-3-5-icc-profile-support/, the latest Firefox supports ICC Color Profiles. However, there appeared to be problems in the implementation of this support — especially for the Windows platform.
Problems with Firefox 3.5
While the implementation of ICC Profile support released in Firefox 3.5 went a long way toward standardizing the way users see online images which utilize ICC Profiles, there were two major problems.
First, as mentioned by an astute commenter on my last post on this topic, the Firefox team decided to only implement Version 2 of the ICC Profile standard. While this is a huge step forward, version 4 of the ICC Standard has been around since 2005 (from what I could find). Therefore, there are many instances where support for Version 2 is simply insufficient.
To see an example of this, see the International Color Consortium (ICC) official page to test browsers for Version 4 compatibility here.
The second problem with Firefox 3.5 was that on many Windows machines, images containing a Version 2 profile were displayed incorrectly. In fact, they appeared much too dark.
One Problem Solved
Just released today was the latest update to Firefox 3.5, version 3.5.2. This update fixes the second problem discussed above. (See release notes – Bug 497363.) In theory, with this release, the images which displayed very dark under the old version now display correctly.
While I really didn’t know how much of a difference it would make, after installing the update on my Windows machine, the images on my last Firefox post appear much better.
Now, if only they could fix the support for Version 4 of the ICC Color Profiles…