Safari's Color Management: What's The Deal?

5/16/2009 @ 11:20 AM in Blog > Internet


So I was working on designing a site doing my usual Photoshop and my buddy tells me the background color of my images doesn't match in Safari. He sent me a screen shot and sure enough it didn't match.



What the hell? So after some quick Googling I found out Safari uses color management to make your images look "better" or "correct" based on the color profile you save with the image. What? Ok, I can see how that might be beneficial for photos, but not for web design where images are embedded everywhere against a specified color background.

After reading tons of "another reason why Mac's rule" comments on Flickr I removed the color profile from my image and all was honky dory. I was left to wonder if FireFox or Safari is doing things right and I've come to the conclusion that Safari sucks. This is a screen shot of what I see in Photoshop. The original image of my Twitter bird is on the left side on top of the screen shot. Indeed the background color has been changed by Safari. QTS! (quit that s***)



Here's someone that thinks like I do. Don't use Safari.