by Mozilla has released a new extension for Firefox that allows users to manage color calibration in their browser across devices.
By default, Firefox uses the color management of Windows, macOS, Linux and other operating systems to optimize and render colors and images to improve users’ browsing experience. However, with the new Extended Color Management add-on, users can disable color management and restart Firefox so that the colors of graphics and videos are consistent across devices.
This allows media engineers and content creators to make consistent and reliable assumptions about the color pipeline between the content viewed in a browser and the actual pixel values being sent to a computer’s display.
While most users are unaware of this, different monitors, operating systems, and browsers vary in color output. To ensure each workstation can see consistent color output across images and videos, color management applications need to be calibrated to the same specs, which can be quite a hassle.
While creative applications like Photoshop allow you to turn off color management, most browsers do not. For this reason, Mozilla’s Extended Color Management extension can be very useful for those who need to have material checked by another party remotely via a browser on a well-calibrated display.
Advanced color management
In a new blog post, Mozilla’s Extensions and Addons team revealed that some of the world’s leading visual effects studios, including Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), use Firefox as part of their creative process when making movies and TV shows.
As visual effects studios and their vendors began working from home during the pandemic, color calibration became particularly difficult compared to simply managing it in the office. That’s why Mozilla worked with ILM over the past year to develop its new Extended Color Management add-on.
With the company’s new expansion, Lucasfilm and its remote partners are now able to see intended colors and view dailies more easily than ever, especially when working remotely.
J. Schulte, Global Imaging Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, explained how the company has worked with Mozilla to make it even easier to display color-accurate content in Firefox:
“At ILM, we want to ensure that all content is as color accurate as possible, no matter where we see it. Updates to Firefox have allowed us to further improve the color accuracy of content viewed in one browser than any other browser. When we identified a new use case for Firefox, their team responded and updated their browser to address the need.”
