Speaking to you about the importance of testing is like preaching to the choir. What browsers do you test on? If you develop on a PC, do you also check on the Mac? I basically ignore IE on Mac because that has the most quirks and the fewest users according to various logs I check. Safari on Mac, however, I rarely have problems with. If it works in Firefox, it usually renders the same in Safari. Surprise. Originally I had images on my site saved as PNG because it was a smaller file size with higher quality. I didn’t do transparencies with it since IE 6 has issues with that. But it seems PNG renders a little differently, color-wise, on Safari than the other browsers. What a “Gotcha.” I had to convert the graphics to .gif and now there should be no odd color differences between page edge and page background. And this is not a new problem:

In older versions of Opera and in pre-Tiger Safari, PNG colors don’t match CSS colors when there is no color space information stored in the PNG files. Also some old Mac versions of Mozilla and Netscape 6 applied a gamma change to unlabeled PNGs. – The Sad Story of PNG Gamma “Correction”

Lesson learned: When color consistency is necessary, beware the PNG.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Site Foo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.