Seeing Red: Safari on Windows

by , 1:25 PM EDT, June 19th, 2007

Safari on Windows is, well, Safari and doesn't change the Web browsing rules or experience on Windows. But one thing it does do is provide a better visual experience in the handling of color, according to C|Net.

No company understands color and color syncing better than Apple, which has owned the pre-press, print, and publishing business for years. So rather than settle just for the sRGB standard traditionally used by Browsers on Windows, Apple used their expertise to go one better.

Brad Hinkel, author of a Color Management in Digital Photography believes that sRGB is fine for most people, but "doesn't encompass the full gamut of colors that the human eye can perceive or that can be displayed on the latest monitors."

Despite the fact that most images on the Web are encoded with sRGB, Apple which is always thinking about graphics professionals, has coded Windows Safari to also see if an image is tagged with a particular ICC color profile and displays it correctly for the user's monitor.

The people who might care about this are artists who sell their work on the Internet. They certainly want their work to have the best possible color.

Of course, Microsoft and the other Browser makers aren't standing still. Even so, one never gets a second chance to make a first impression, and leave it to Apple to attend to those little color and graphics details out of the box that everyone else has on their "to do" list.