What’s wrong with colors in Firefox?

Posted by Jorge Bernal March 08, 2008

I’m not the first one to realize this, but there’s something wrong with color management in Firefox. Look at the following screenshots.

This is the original picture in Aperture, with colors exactly like I wanted:

Now the same picture in Safari

And now for something completely different: Firefox

In this particular picture, I used saturation to give strength to the moment, only to find out Firefox decided to wash out my colors.

The technical story here is that our monitors can’t display every color, so we have color spaces, and Firefox ignores them. Good news is that color profiles are supported in the Firefox 3 beta, though not enabled by default. You’ll have to open about:config and switch the gfx.color_management.enabled variable to true.

Bad news is, that will only work for you. If you’re trying to show your pictures to the rest of the world, they won’t see the same colors.

To learn more about this:

• Color space
• sRGB
• Web Browser Color Management Tutorial
• Digital-Image Color Spaces
• Introduction to Colour Science

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”

Posted by Jorge Bernal February 28, 2008

I don’t know why, but lately I’ve stopped blogging. I usually don’t have enough ideas or content for a complete blog post, but mostly small things. One of those small things are quotes.

I don’t want to crowd this blog with quotes, so I’m using tumblr for that: My quotes

Some of them:

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” -Betty Reese

A ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not what ships were built for.

Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.” -Walter Chrysler

Does your company have Happiness Engineers?

Posted by Jorge Bernal January 28, 2008

The answer is probably no. We don’t have one at Warp. But the folks at automattic are looking for one. I case you don’t know who I’m talking about, these are the guys behind wordpress and akismet.

The details on this position are as following:

Happiness Engineer

Our software and services are far from perfect, and when things go wrong people aren’t shy about contacting us asking for help. We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need. In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks. The customers range from the everyday blogger to VIPs like CNN, Flickr, and People Magazine. The job requires:

• Patience and grace.
• Excellent writing skills.
• Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and CSS.

It’s hard to explain how thrilled I am about the existence of a position like that, but I’ll try: it has made me hesitate. I’m one of the owners of Warp, we have recently passed our third year, we are growing, we have 20 employees and we’re close to release version 1.0 of eBox platform. I’d call this a success. But, when I read job descriptions like these, I feel the need to apply or, at least, meet these people.

I’m aware I cannot be in all places at the same time, so I have to let that one go. The good experience I get from this is collecting those details that made me want to go there and trying to make Warp a better place for all of us