I spent a few minutes tonight figuring out why PNG files display differently on Safari (and IE6/7). It’s related to both gamma and colour space.

A partial solution:

pngcrush -rem cHRM -rem gAMA -rem iCCP -rem sRGB -d fixed/ *

The real solution:

There is no way of making PNG images that match CSS colors in all PNG-supporting browsers. This reduces the usefulness of the otherwise excellent image format. If the image colors and the colors defined in a style sheet need to match, it is safer to use GIF or JPEG. If you want to use PNG and don’t care about older browser versions (pre-Tiger Safari in particular), the best course of action is removing all the color space information from the PNG files. If you only want a match with the background color, you could make the background a PNG image as well. –The Sad Story of PNG Gamma “Correction”

I like Joel Spolesky. He’s a great writer, and he’s got a good head for managing software. But he is blind to Microsoft’s insanity, taking the agnostic-zealot position. I can forgive him, though, as he writes passionately and is willing to question the other zealots.

What Joel and the other flamers have missed is that standards conformance is easy, if you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to realize that it’s already solved. If Microsoft could place nicely, they would be able to cooperate and join the Webkit fray. The world would be a better place.

Apple, Nintendo, and others have figured it out. Why build your own browser? Why not just pitch in to an existing effort, or license something? Standards are easier if you don’t insist on building it yourself.

Standards are easy. It’s NIH that is difficult.

Midori is a Webkit-based browser for Gnome. It’s new, and the artwork is a bit weird, but it means that other Webkit-esque browsers are coming. Yay.

Details on Opera’s Wii-remote browser API. Do funky stuff with the Wii-mote from within the Wii’s Opera browser.

A Javascript/browser game. It’s possible, and expect to see more of it in the future.

Not that in-browser windows are a great idea, but here is a Javascript library for showing modal and non-modal Javascript/browser windows. The library includes window styling, dialogs, and performs quite well on my workstation.

A lightweight Firebug plugin for browsers other than Firefox.

Opera released a new version of their mini browser this week, and here’s how it fares on the ACID2 test.

A very complete guide to CSS float theory, including descriptions of many common browser bugs (mostly IE) and workarounds.

Browsershots.org lets you request screenshots of a webpage in a wide variety of browsers. Handy for testing page layout in the less common browsers.