Why does IE change the color? - colors

I've placed an image on top of a div. I'm trying to blend the image into the div (The div is a solid color). In Google Chrome, it looks great! The colors blend perfectly. In IE 7, however, the colors show a hard line even though they should be the same color! After some examination (a print screen put into paint.net to check the actual RGB values), IE 7 is actually lightning up my image.
The blend has to look seamless. Google Chrome was fine with this thus far. Any ideas why IE 7 wont display the color right?

The two browsers are using different rendering engines. There are minor differences between them in how they render graphics, particularly jpegs.
The differences are minor but unavoidable.
Most of the time it goes unnoticed; it only makes an appearance in cases like yours when you try to position it against an element with a solid background colour that is supposed to be the same.
You may be able to resolve the issue by using a different image format. Try saving the image as a PNG. PNGs tend to be rendered more accurately between the browsers than jpegs, so that might be enough to solve your problem.
If that doesn't solve your problem, you could try using PNGs alpha transparency feature to produce an image with a fade to transparent at the edge, and then overlap the background colour behind it. This will definitely give you a smooth transition, but is a bit more technical, so harder to achieve. It will also give you problems with older versions of IE (IE6 for sure, I think you'll be okay with IE7), as they had some major bugs with PNG transparency. (If this is an issue for you, there are work-arounds for this; google IEPNGFix for more)

Related

Chromium and Firefox display colors differently and I don't know which one is doing it right

I've been building a website under Ubuntu 17.10 and use Firefox and Chromium for testing. The two browsers show quite different colors (not only for images but all colors) and I always thought that it is Chromium which for some reason wrongly over-saturates them, so up until now I always chose colors that looked right in Firefox.
But I'm starting to get more and more complaints about the website's background being too purple - which it shouldn't be in my opinion as only the blue component of it's color (#eeeeff) is "elevated", but it has reached a point that more people are seeing it as purple than blue, what makes me confused.
This is the aforementioned color displayed in Firefox (left) and Chromium (right).
And this is how I see a website:
The difference is quite large (notice how even the favicon is different) and I'm asking you to tell me which one is the browser I should trust when choosing the colours of my websites and whether I could do something to avoid it being displayed so differently in different browsers.
(There are some users that see the overly saturated colors in Firefox too. So now which is the right one, really?)
Another option is to open chrome://flags/ and select the option sRGB on the Force color profile item.
By using this setting instead of disabling the Use hardware acceleration when available, you don't lose some nice features like the 3D view on Google Maps.
Solution found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/74h5yh/blue_shows_as_purple_in_chrome/
Using GPick as a Color Picker and calling a Website with Color Hexcode like
http://www.color-hex.com/color-palette/54430
I see, that Firefox renders the RGB Colors exactly, meaning GPick identifies the same Hex Code from CSS.
Whereas Chromium renders some kind of differnt color.
You can call
chrome://flags/#force-color-profile
and set the Color Profile in Chromium to sRGB, so the rendered Color from Chromium is identified the same as the HexCode with GPick.
If you disable 'Use hardware acceleration when available' in Chromium Settings and relaunch, Chromium displays colors correctly. When turned on, Chromium colors are off. I consider this as a workaround until Chromium color management issue with hardware acceleration is resolved.
With the other two colours being equal, your colour is right in the middle of "blue territory".
If you convert it to HSL and look on the hue line, you can see it is right in the middle of the "blue" frequency range.
Consequently, any hint of green or red is incorrect.

last state Animated Gif designed for html email in Fireworks cs5 fails in some clients

This is my second question, and I’m hoping to resolve an issue that I haven’t found addressed, though I did search for an answer.
Links and screenshots to problem are below. Using Fireworks CS5, I have created an animated gif consisting of 3 states that loops 3 times. It is built on layers, with the 3 states sharing only a background border. They do not share the background (the background is grouped layer consisting of a red box with a clipping path of white, which seems to work in the first two states, but fails in the third state) itself, or any other element.
It is a tile ad for an html e-newsletter, and it works on some clients (gmail, for instance), but the final state does not render properly in other clients (mac mail, for instance). To add to the issue, the same file was rendering correctly in Mac Mail earlier. The gif works if I open it in a browser (usually), as well.
I thought that animated gifs were very stable across platforms except for problems with looping in Outlook 2007 and I've never had this issue before (granted my experience is limited). Has anyone else had this experience? Does anyone have advice on this issue?
Many thanks,
Andrew.
Link to the good. This is the animated gif file. It may not work in all browsers (I did test the file thoroughly, but the weird issue just seems completely sporadic), but renders correctly in latest Firefox for Mac OS 10.7x.
Link to the bad. The third state is see-through, the background layer is not rendering.
Turn Off the Alpha Transparency in the optimization panel. After carefully examining each state, I realized that I had Alpha Transparency turned ON in the export. Even though each state had a solid red back ground, and even though the other states correctly rendered the solid red background, the Alpha Transparency was messing up the last state of the animation. To correct it, I simply turned OFF the Alpha Transparency. I don't know why I didn't think about that as the solution before. I hope this answer helps someone!

Transitioning svg text opacity

Has anybody ever had any issues with transitioning the opacity of an SVG text element? I'm using both the fill-opacity style and the stroke-opacity style to fade the text elements into and out of existence. It works fine on most browsers, but doesn't transition at all in Chrome on Mac -- the text just pops in and out all at once.
I tried setting the "opacity" attribute in addition to fill-opacity and stroke-opacity and that does seem to make it work, although now I see a weird flicker effect just before and after the transition runs. It's like it's setting it to opacity=1 for a split second before it sets it to 0 and then transitions to 1.
Another interesting thing is that other shapes (circle, rect) fade in and out just fine with nearly identical code to what I'm using with text.
This does seem to be weirdness with a specific browser, but I'm wondering about other people's experiences with opacity on text elements. Are there tricks to get it to behave consistently?
What version of Chrome are you using? I noticed a bug in Chrome dev some time ago when working on the word cloud but it appears to have been fixed as of 19.0.1077.3 dev. Perhaps the fix hasn't made it into your particular version yet?
In my case, using opacity fixed the problem temporarily. The flicker effect could be due to exponent notation not being parsed for very small numbers; you can try using 1e-6 instead of 0 to get around this.
For an animation I made some months ago I toggled the style and used webkit-transition, in combination with visibility: hidden. This seems to work well. If that doesn't work, you could try transitioning to an opacity near zero.

alpha transparency solution in IE

I am building a website with a TON of png-24 files that have transparent background. In IE 6 they obviously aren't displayed correctly, so I need some sort of reliable, good solution that will fix the PNG problem in IE and require little work and be reliable. Any good ideas?
For IE6 transparency I follow a personal flow:
1. If there is just one or two PNG images (like a logo, or a normal image) I just use filter:
#selector {background:none; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='test.png', sizingMethod='crop');}
Problems: If applied to a link, it will no longer be clickable. Possibly apply to the h1#logo and have the a be transparent.
2. If I have a lot of 24-bit PNG files, or special use cases (repeating background, etc), I use DD_belatedPNG
IMPORTANT FOR IE7 + IE8: You cannot animate or combine the filter:alpha (which is used for overall opacity on an element in IE and also used by jQuery to set opacity) property with 24-bit transparent PNG images. It changes it to look like 8-bit transparency, with everything that is not 100% opaque or transparent taking on a black background.
Here are a few good png fixes for ie6:
http://labs.unitinteractive.com/unitpngfix.php
http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/
There are a lot IE PNG fixes on the net, which basically all work with the same technique. The older Internet Explorers do not support alpha in PNGs directly, but they all have a filter that does so. So writing the following code as part of a css of an object puts the image in the src to the background of the element:
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='image.png');
That way, you can easily display transparency in the Internet Explorer. However it's a lot easier to just get one of the png fix scripts (in JavaScript) and include it to your page inside of conditional comments. Then the script will make all your images working automatically.
We used Dean Edwards' IE7 for this. (So named before IE7 came out.) It's been good for that kind of thing.
There are currently many options to get this working. The standard is apply a DirectX filter through CSS to change make the PNG transparent in IE6. There are even scripts that will automatically do this when the webpage loads from an IE6 or less client.
http://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=transparent+png+ie6

How to get PNG transparency working in browsers that don't natively support it?

Our (beloved) designer keeps creating PNG files with transparent backgrounds for use in our applications. I'd like to make sure that this feature of the PNG works in "older" browsers as well. What's the best solution?
edits below
#mabwi & #syd - Whether or not I agree about the use of a PNG is not the point. This is a problem that I need to solve!
#Tim Sullivan - IE7.js looks pretty cool, but I don't think I want to introduce all of the other changes an application. I'd like a solution that fixes the PNG issue exclusively. Thanks for the link.
IE PNG Fix 2.0 which supports background-position and -repeat!
Also paletted 8-bit PNG with full alpha transparency exist, contrary to what Photoshop and GIMP may make you believe, and they degrade better in IE6 – it just cuts down transparency to 1-bit. Use pngquant to generate such files from 24-bit PNGs.
I've found what looks to be a very good solution here: Unit Interactive -> Labs -> Unit PNG Fix
update Unit PNG is also featured on a list of PNG fix options on NETTUTS
Here are the highlights from their website:
Very compact javascript: Under 1kb!
Fixes some interactivity problems caused by IE’s filter
attribute.
Works on img objects and background-image attributes.
Runs automatically. You don’t have to define classes or call
functions.
Allows for auto width and auto height elements.
Super simple to deploy.
IE7.js will provide support for PNGs (including transparency) in IE6.
I've messed with trying to make a site with .pngs and it just isn't worth it. The site becomes slow, and you use hacks that don't work 100%. Here's a good article on some options, but my advice is to find a way to make gifs work until you don't have to support IE6. Or just give IE6 a degraded experience.
Using PNGs in IE6 is hardly any more difficult than any other browser. You can support all of it in your CSS without Javascript. I've seen this hack shown before...
div.theImage {
background : url(smile.png) top left no-repeat;
height : 100px;
width : 100px;
}
* html div.theImage {
background : none;
progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src="layout/smile.png", sizingMethod="scale");
}
I'm not so sure this is valid CSS, but depending on the site, it may not matter so much.
(it's worth noting that the URL for the first image is based on the directory of the stylesheet, where the second is based on the directory of the page being viewed - thus why they do not match)
#Hboss
that's all fine and dandy if you know exactly all the files (and the dimensions of each) that you're going to be displaying - it'd be a royal pain to maintain that CSS file, but I suppose it'd be possible. When you want to start using transparent PNGs for some very common purposes: a) incidental graphics such as icons (perhaps of differing size) which work on any background, and b) repeating backgrounds; then you're screwed. Every workaround I've tried has hit a stumbling block at some point (can't select text when the background is transparent, sometimes the images are displayed at wacky sizes, etc etc), and I've found that for maximum reliability I'll have to revert to gifs.
My advice is to give the PNG transparency hack a shot, but at the same time realise that it's definitely not perfect - and just remember, you're bending over backwards for users of a browser which is over 7 years old. What I do these days is give IE6 users a popup on their first visit to the site, with a friendly reminder that their browser is outdated and doesn't offer the features required by modern websites, and, though we'll try our best to give you the best, you'll get a better experience from our site and the internet as a whole if you BLOODY WELL UPGRADED.
I believe all browsers support PNG-8. Its not alpha blended, but it does have transparent backgrounds.
I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure IE6 and less just don't do transparency with PNG files.
You sort of are, and you sort of aren't.
IE6 has no support natively for them.
However, IE has support for crazy custom javascript/css and COM objects (which is how they originally implemented XmlHttpRequest)
All of these hacks basically do this:
Find all the png images
Use a directx image filter to load them and produce a transparent image in some kind of format IE understands
Replace the images with the filtered copy.
One thing to think about is Email clients. You often want PNG-24 transparency but in Outlook 2003 with a machine using IE6. Email clients won't allow CSS or JS tricks.
Here is a good way to handle that.
http://commadot.com/png-8-that-acts-like-png-24-without-fireworks/
If you export your images as PNG-8 from Fireworks then they'll act the same as gif images. So they won't look shitty and grey, transparency will be transparency but they won't have the full 24 bit loveliness that other browsers do.
Might not totally solve your problem but at least you can get part way there just be re-exporting them.
I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure IE6 and less just don't do transparency with PNG files.
I have two "solutions" that I use. Either create GIF files with transparency and use those everywhere, or just use them for IE 6 and older with conditional style sheets. The second really only works if you are using them as backgrounds, etc.

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