Sunday, November 29, 2009

Firefox 3.5/3.6 Color management - a step backwards

For whatever stupid reason, Firefox 3.5 and the upcoming 3.6 beta have decided to drop proper ICC4 colour management in their rendering engines. Firefox 3.5 only supports ICC2, and apparently, ICC4 support is still missing from Firefox 3.6.

So there we are, back to mismatched colours, back to the dull shades, back to what IE used to show. I personally have no idea why the "geniuses" at Mozilla decided to take this step backwards, and I don't think they're going to do anything about it either. Their reason states that the new colour management engine - QCMS - doesn't support ICC4 yet. Sadly, the thread states that it is "solved and closed". Far from it. So, we shall have to wait until the QCMS engine matures to something that was working quite well for the past few years.