Firefox 3 Color Management

Oh, happy day!  Mozilla Firefox 3 now supports color management!  This means color-aware browsing of photos and images in a decent browser.  Windows users didn’t have a mainstream color-aware browser available until Firefox 3.

To activate this breakthrough in WinXP:

  1. Install and launch Firefox 3.
  2. Type in “about:config” in the URL box.  (Ignore the warning about making custom configurations.)
  3. Find “gfx.color_management.enabled” and double-click to set the value to TRUE.
  4. Find “gfx.color_management.display_profile” just above the previous entry and point this to your ICC/ICM monitor profile.
  5. Close and restart Firefox.

Tip:

  • Find your monitor profile in
    C:\Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color
  • From Windows Explorer, click & drag your monitor profile into the Firefox URL box, and Firefox will give you the path in “Firefox’ form.
  • Example:
    file:///C:/WINDOWS/system32/spool/drivers/color/my_monitor_profile.icc
  • Enter this “file:///…” string into the Firefox gfx.color_management.display_profile field.

Enjoy browsing with a color-managed browser!!!  Photos look so much better in true color!

For those of you not using Firefox, go to the International Color Consortium to check if your current brower supports color management.  (IE7 currently does not.)

Leave a Reply