Firefox and its Color Management Quirks

When it comes to color management, Firefox has a quirk, which will affect users who use Firefox with a monitor that has any kind of ICC profile other than sRGB applied. This is typically the case for wide gamut monitors and any monitor that is calibrated and profiled using color measuring devices such as from Datacolor or X-Rite.

Unfortunately the Web is still full of images that do not contain color space information. Most browsers apply sRGB to such untagged images, which is correct in almost all cases. Firefox however, in its standard configuration, does not apply any color management to such images, leading to their colors being interpreted in the monitor color space. So if the monitor color space is different from sRGB, this leads to wrong colors being displayed, in most cases visible as over-saturation.

Check out the Web browser color management test from cameratico.com to see if your browser is affected by this issue.

UPDATE Jul 6, 2022: in the first version of this article I stated that also my own website is affected because Format, my service provider, strips all color space information from uploaded images. However, after bringing this to their attention, Format fixed this and now retains color space information. Yeah!

The screenshot below shows how the issue affected display of images on this website (before Format fixed the issue), on my own system with a calibrated and profiled wide gamut monitor. On the left side you’ll see my previous blog article displayed with Firefox, on the right side with Chrome:

How to Avoid This Issue

If you are a Firefox user, there is an easy fix for this issue. The configuration value gfx.color_management.mode is set to “2” by default, applying color management only to tagged images. Setting the value to “1” will apply color management to all images and use sRGB for untagged images. To change the value, go into the advanced configuration by typing “about:config” in the Firefox address bar, then look for the configuration value “gfx.color_management.mode”. Set the value to “1”, restart Firefox and you are good to go.

If you are web site creator, of course you cannot rely on all of your visitors making that configuration change, so whenever you process and deliver images, you should make sure to retain color space information, in form of the EXIF tag “Color Space” and also in form of the embedded ICC profile. This will ensure that your images are displayed correctly in the Firefox browser on color-managed monitors.