April 29th, 2008
Deb Richardson wrote up an interesting piece today describing color profile support in Firefox 3. The result of a color profile is a more-accurate mapping from an original set of colors to better match the intended rendering. Profiles can be provided by the operating system (to provide better color distribution globally) or even locally by individual images.
For example, observe the following image which compares the difference between Firefox 2, Firefox 3 (with color profile support), and an image in Adobe Photoshop:
There is a noticeable difference between the rendering of the image in Firefox 2 compared to both Photoshop and Firefox 3 (in which they are rendered identically). All of this is due to the fact that Firefox 3 and Photoshop use the additional color profile information to get a better mapping of the resulting colors.
There's one tricky point, however: Color profile support is disabled, by default, in Firefox 3. However, it can be quickly enabled by installing the Color Management Add-on or by twiddling some options in about:config.
The reasoning for the feature being disabled was outlined for two particular issues:
- There was a large 10-15% drop in performance when this feature was enabled. The extra time spent on large images began to add up quite quickly. Obviously this will be a point that'll be worked on in upcoming releases - but introducing a regression that large was pretty much unacceptable.
- Plugins (such as Flash, Silverlight, Quicktime, etc.) did not do color profile correction, causing rough mis-renderings to occur. This correction is, unfortunately, left up to the plugins themselves - leaving this out of the realm of the browser itself. It's unclear as to how this will be resolved.
At the very least, however, you can grab the Color Management Add-on with your copy of Firefox 3 and begin to view your pictures with an extra level of color and crispness.
Tags: firefox, colors, mozilla, browser
17 Comments on 'Color Profiles in Firefox 3'
April 4th, 2008
The Mozilla Labs team has been busy working on some new extensions to enhance user experience while testing out new concepts. One extension that recently got a major update was Personas.
The premise behind the extension is that it's currently too difficult to trivially theme and customize your Firefox experience. To counter this Personas makes the experience fantastically simple. For example, the following can be achieved using only a single image (which is seamlessly chopped up and positioned by Personas):
Now what I find to be especially interesting about this extension is the recent introduction of dynamic content into the rendering area. Instead of requiring the use of an image you can now specify a live URL (which can contain any number of things - including images, SVG, Canvas Element, JavaScript, etc.).
Here's a quick peek at putting a live Google map behind the top toolbar area of the browser:
Users are starting to contribute their own, like this page of a live web cam watching a university in Germany.
I'm really excited by this super-tivial means of styling an application. It's like taking the best part of HTML/CSS/JS widgets and combining it with trivial user customization and community.
While the end result may, or may not, look glamorous (depending on your taste) it's undeniable that simple user customization is a quick trip to get users more excited about their experience (making the browser 'their own'). I'm definitely curious to see what will built with this tool - especially now that dynamic content is being thrown in to the mix.
Update:
I was able to get a code example from Chris Beard for developing one of these advanced Persona extensions. To quote him:
You just need to put in script or content within the header/footer blocks. Also adding support so that it will pop up a window on first run so you can prompt for settings (e.g. flickr tags to use to render a photo mosaic) as well as an options window which users will be open for each Persona from the main interface.
...
The URL gets called every 60 minutes loading into a background iframe. The iframe is then captured every minute with the resulting image transfer to the chrome as a PNG data URL. No user content is privileged.
This is especially interesting since you can seed your browser layout with personal information, as he mentioned (photos from your Flickr stream, weather for your location, etc.)
Tags: browser, firefox, mozilla
12 Comments on 'Firefox Personas'
