Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and colour profiles

After upgrading to Fedora 11 (and thus upgrading Firefox to 3.5 Beta 4), I noticed that Firefox was not correctly identifying some of the ICC colour profiles and thus was rendering some of the images incorrectly.

According to this wiki page, it should be a simple matter of going to about:config and changing the value of gfx.color_management.mode to 1, which enables full colour management (default is 2, which enables colour management only on properly tagged images). This, however, does not seem to work…

After looking into the issue, it seems that there’s a bug with the way in which Firefox identifies the colour profiles, resulting in some incorrectly rendered images. Although the bug has been fixed in the trunk release (i.e. the nightly/hourly builds will have the bug-fix), the “proper” versioned releases will not.

From what I can work out, the bug-fix won’t be pushed into the main release until the last minute, and will most likely be put in the 3.5.1 release (or possibly even the 3.6 release!), so if correct colour profiles are important to you, you’re either going to want to start using the hourly/nightly builds or downgrade back to an earlier version of Firefox which doesn’t have the bug.