Safari paves way for brighter web colours

Apple's Safari may not be rewriting the rules for web browsing on Windows just yet but it's leading the way with one significant change: photographs with better colour.

Unlike the prevailing browsers on the internet - Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox - the Apple browser supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colours. With the beta version of Safari now on Windows, Mac OS X users aren't the only ones who'll be able to see the difference.

However, Apple won't keep that edge for long. Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3 browser, due to ship in beta form this July, is likely to include support for richer colour, said Vlad Vukicevic, a technical leader at Mozilla and a photo enthusiast.

Together, the moves could help boost the internet beyond the orbit of the sRGB colour scheme, a broadly supported but limited standard initially introduced by HP and Microsoft. But it's not likely that web photography will achieve sRGB escape velocity until the dominant IE also follows suit.

Although the vast majority of images on the web are encoded with sRGB, alternatives such as Adobe RGB, the European Colour Intiaitive's ECI RGB and Microsoft's scRGB can display a broader palette of colours.

sRGB is fine for most people today, said Brad Hinkel, author of Colour Management in Digital Photography and more recently a Microsoft project leader. But it doesn't encompass the full gamut of colours that the human eye can perceive or that can be displayed on the latest monitors.

Hinkel said: "I've seen them. They're knock your socks off, intensely amazing - beautiful, vibrantly rich colours. Getting colour management into Safari, into the browser and on the internet is a great thing."

Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com