New Firefox: Color-Managed + PicLens Dazzle

New version of Firefox is out (although it only minimally differs from the beta that has been out for a while). Among many useful improvements (including the "Awesome Bar"), the not-so-obvious, but very important one, is that Firefox joins Safari as the 2nd color-managed browser that respects ICC ver. 2 and 4 color profiles. In practice, that will mean more consistently looking images on different computers, which is sort of a big deal for anyone that posts photos online.

>>> Alas, the color-management support in Firefox is NOT turned on by default (why? who knows!). Since the instructions on how to fix it have been posted on Flickr, and lots of other websites (see Prashant Khapane's blog), I won't repeat them here.

With Firefox 3, I also dicovered Cooliris's plug-in called Piclens  that makes photo surfing on flickr (or a few other search engines, incl. Google and amazon.com) a DAZZLING (and dizzying?) experience. Talk about WOW! factor. Plus, how could I not like a website that uses navy+lime-green color scheme on its website :).

Cooliris also has a less flashy, but potentially more useful plugin called Cooliris Previews, that is a complete knock-out! Using it with iGoogle page with numerous "widgets" makes it so much easier, and faster, that it's almost unbelievable!