Safari Color Weirdness

Well, I've recently had a weird experience with the color rendering of Safari, and I wasn't sure whether to ask this question here or in the display forums, but I guess I'll start here. This will no doubt be a long message, and for that I apologize in advance.

I have a Web page at http://www.voodooimages.com for which we use an RGB 90/90/90 background for color neutrality (a bit darker than 128/128/128, but still neutral) because it is a photography site. There is a composite image on the main page and a logo at the top of the other pages of which the backgrounds are also 90/90/90, so that they will blend in with the background of the page as a whole. These images are JPEGs with an sRGB color space embedded. I could have used GIFs with transparent backgrounds, I suppose, but the JPEGs are much better quality images. At home, I have an older Mac (733mHz G4) that I use with two CRT displays, the primary one of which is calibrated and profiled for correct color presentation, and the Safari Web browser. At work, I am forced to use PCs and Internet Explorer.

I am about to "pull the trigger" on a 2.66 gHz Intel MacPro and a 30" Cinema Display, and since a friend of mine recently bought this identical setup, I went to his house last weekend to see his new stuff before I placed the order for mine. Since he had not yet taken the trouble to calibrate and profile his display, I was especially interested in how it rendered color "right out of the box," since the Cinema Displays are supposedly set up from Apple to a 6500 degree white point and a 2.2 gamma, which is what I calibrate my displays to. One of the places we went to look at was my Web site. Imagine my surprise when we saw that the embedded backgrounds of the composite and logo images were being displayed significantly darker than the general page backgrounds on his new display! How can that be, we thought, when Safari is a "color aware" browser and both of those things are set to 90/90/90? They show identically and merge together perfectly at home on my profiled display, at my other friend's profiled 23" Cinema Display, and on every PC I've ever seen (although often way too bright and washed out on uncalibrated Dell and HP displays). Totally baffled, we decided to get out his profiling puck and profile the new display. After profiling, the colors of the page background and the images blended perfectly, as they should. "Well, that is STRANGE," we thought. We called my other friend at that point and confirmed that the colors showed correctly on his profiled 23" Cinema Display, but that they were different on his new, uncalibrated, 15" MacBook Pro display. This was getting curiouser and curiouser.

We were all three headed for an Apple Pro Applications Aperture seminar that afternoon, and we planned to stop by the local Apple store on the way, so when we arrived there we started checking out my Web site on all of the Macs and their displays in the store, all of which are, of course, running "out of the box" color profiles (Cinema HD, I suppose). Sure enough, they all displayed the colors incorrectly, with the page background lighter than the 90/90/90 embedded in the images. Stumped and dismayed, we started asking the store geniuses what was going on - nobody knew. One of them downloaded Firefox to one of the machines and tried my page in that browswer - perfect color match! What the heck? We checked the source code of the page...sure enough, the background color was set to 5A/5A/5A (RGB 90/90/90 in hexadecimal). We left, having accomplished nothing but confusing three more people.

So we went to the seminar (which was VERY good, by the way). Later that evening, my friend with the uncalibrated MacBook Pro went back and checked my Web page using other profiles, but still not having calibrated his display. He found that the color mismatch only revealed itself when Safari is used with two profiles - Cinema HD (the default as-shipped) and Apple RGB. So, it appears that Safari, the only "color aware" browser other than IE for the Mac (when you turn color awareness on, which nobody does because it no longer works with new Macs), has a color rendering problem (at least for RGB 90/90/90) when used with Apple-developed profiles. How weird is that? First of all, it's exactly the opposite from what I would have expected, and second, it means that the 90% or so of Mac users who never bother to profile their displays (and why should they? They're very good out of the box and unless you're a photographer making prints, why buy profiling hardware and software?) think my Webmaster and I are idiots who can't design a Web page properly. I'd just as soon not leave that impression with people who use my preferred platform.

Interestingly, my friend with the MacBook Pro also has an iPhone, and it does NOT display this color mismatch, even though it uses Safari as its browser. I'm guessing that this may be because the Safari it uses may be different from the full-blown program as regards color awareness or that the profile of its display is unlike the Cinema Displays to save memory space on the phone.

I've checked to verify that the composite and logo images at the site do indeed have sRGB embedded - they do. The background color source code (body bgcolor="5A5A5A") is correct. I asked the Webmaster to add a pound sign to that code to see if it made a difference - it didn't. We're all still baffled about what is causing this discrepancy. On the theory that every situation you experience has already been experienced by someone else out there, I'm coming here looking for help. Do any of you know what is causing this anomaly? I would like very much to fix it if that is indeed possible.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Bob Krueger