Another reason Firefox 3 rocks

We're all photographers these days, aren't we? People love taking photos, with digital cameras and cell phones making it easy to accumulate loads of snapshots without all the cost of getting film developed. Add to that all the free Web photo hosting services out there and you've got a world crazy about photos. I wonder how many pictures are taken and shared each and every day?

Anyhow, what I personally have never been crazy about is how most Web browsers rendered the color on my photos. They don't look the same on the Web as they do on my computer's screen, using my programs such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge, etc. They look flat.

The reason? (you knew one was coming!) Until now, most Web browsers didn't support the sRGB color profile. My software - and the software most other photographers use - exports Jpegs for the Web using this sRGB profile. And then Internet Explorer or Firefox 2 just flat out ignores it. (note: If you shoot jpeg on a point-and-shoot and just upload with no adjustments, ironically enough, you might not notice this difference. That's because Jpegs are adjusted in-camera and usually really boost up the saturation and contrast beyond what I personally feel looks "natural." So viewed through the browser, these kinds of images - a little hot to begin with - actually end up looking normal).

Safari on the Mac (and now Safari for Windows) has always supported color profiles, so images viewed thru Safari should look just fine. Now Firefox 3.0 has joined the party, which means that the sRGB color space is finally supported by a major browser. It's not on by default, but fortunately pretty easy to enable. Here are the instructions:

• Enter about:config in the address bar - hit Enter.
• Scroll down to 'gfx.color.management.enabled'
• Clicking twice on this line triggers between TRUE and FALSE.
• Restart Firefox, and you're set.

Here are some photos I put up to help test out colors in Web browsers. Check them out with Internet Explorer and Firefox, side by side, and see how they look to you. They're nothing special in terms of content; just useful for looking at colors.

http://www.vincedistefano.com/lancasterscenes/

See the sliver of sky on the upper left on the dome/clock photo? It looks light blue, just like the sky did on the day I took it - and just like my camera LCD and Lightroom displayed it. When I looked at this photo in IE, however, it barely had any blue at all and was closer to light grey.

Hopefully all my friends over at photo.net upgrade to Firefox 3 soon as well; maybe my ratings will improve once my photos are viewed a little closer to the way I meant them to be seen. :-)

Firefox 3

I've recommended the Firefox web browser (available for Mac and Windows) to a lot of people. After spending about a week using this latest, greatest version 3, I can tell you that it's an even easier recommendation to make. Why's that, you ask?

First, it's definitely more responsive, and tests show that it has a lower memory footprint. That means it uses less RAM for the same tasks, freeing up memory for your other (more, ahem, RAM-hogging) applications. As somebody who opens a lot of tabs, whatever improvements they made to keep the browser from slowing down with lots of tabs is most welcome.

Second, there are lots of little tweaks and additions geared towards making your web browsing life more enjoyable and productive. For example, the Bookmarks toolbar gives you a "Most Visited" option, the usefulness of which should be apparent. There's also a "recently bookmarked" feature that comes in handy. In fact, the whole Bookmarks area has been overhauled, so check it out.

The "Awesome Bar" is nice too. Here's how Firefox describes it:

"The Awesome Bar is the affectionate name for the new Firefox 3 Smart Location Bar. The new location bar learns as you use it, adapting to your preferences and making your browsing more personal. When you type in text, the auto-complete function displays possible matching sites from your browsing history, bookmarks, and tags. This makes it easy to scan the list and quickly identify the site you want to visit. Our beta testers started calling it the Awesome Bar and the name stuck!"

I also really like the "identity" notifier, which shows up to the left of your location bar. It's very helpful for identifying secure sites - much more so than the old-school, wee-little lock hidden down at the bottom of the screen almost like an afterthought on older versions. Anyways, you can hover over this area (shown below - the green area on the left) and get useful info about the site you're visiting.

I haven't even looked into the security improvements, but supposedly it's more impervious to malware than previous versions or other browsers.

On Windows, Firefox 3 will replace your version 2 - so if you're the sort with a lot of Firefox 2.0 plug-ins you just can't live without, check to see if your plug in providers have upgraded to support 3 yet. Otherwise, hold off. On the Mac, the new and old version can coexist provided you rename the old version to "Firefox 2."

The FF people were hoping for a million downloads on "opening day," knowing that a LOT of people were looking forward to this release. They far surpassed it. Eight million Web users can't be wrong, so give it a try yourself.