Hi, All --

It's been a whole, happy day of surfing, and I still love K-Meleon. Why doesn't everyone upgrade to this browser???

I do just have one more teeny little question, nothing to worry about... At first I thought all pages have a background color of white because of something to do with strict CSS compliance, or user stylesheet overrides, or other things I haven't delved into yet. But, I can't help noticing that *all* images, even photos on Web sites I created (so I *know* the colors are ok!), are weird.

Really weird. it's almost the feeling one has of looking at the negative of a photo. Any idea what I've done to cause this? I think I'm running 256 colors (well, I know I am right now, since I'm in 1056x.. mode). But the limitation on indexed colors shouldn't apply to jpg files, right? What's really happening? Do I need a higher refresh rate than 60, or something?

This is an old NT machine, but the display is a Viewsonic LCD (model 550 I think).

Cheers --
Carol (techwatcher@accesswriters.com)

The limitation of indexed color applies to all images. If anything, JPEGs will be affected more, because with GIFs it's at least possible to match the display's pallete to the GIF's pallete, whereas JPEGs will almost always contain too many colors to display properly. I don't believe K-Meleon does this pallete-switching, however.

Turning up the refresh rate certainly won't help. I *think* Gecko (and thus K-Meleon) simply doesn't handle colors well in indexed-color mode (the drivers for a video card I had a while back called it "pseudo-color" mode ;-) so nothing short of upping your color depth will fix it. Unfortunately, it sounds like you can't do that because your video card doesn't support a higher bit depth at your LCD's native resolution. My best suggestion would be to spend twenty or thirty dollars on a new video card. *Everything* will look much better in truecolor.

Mark is right about JPG-s. All full-color images (as well as 24bit PNG-s) suffer when using 8bit mode. To lessen the ugly effect windows usually can dither the colors, instead of displaying next closest available color it replaces it with mixed pattern of available colors.

I assume that application has to dither colors itself, windows only takes care of native widgets (desktop, window elements etc). There is good reason for browsers not doing color dither on run because it requires fair amount of cpu to do it constantly. AFAIK Netscape 3 had option to turn dither on/off and IE still has "smart dither" option. I'm not sure what that does, though.

You might want to check if there are some third party drivers available for your video card, in old days some cards used to have weird color depths available as well, like 15bit (although it needed proabably same amount of memory as 16bit .

>>Why doesn't everyone upgrade to this browser???
Because it would be a downgrade from Mozilla 1.1, i'll get Kmeleon back when version .7 comes out.

How big to download is Mozilla 1.1?

Still think this color problem HAS to be related to this browser, since my 256 color mode looks fine when I surf with one of the other 3 browsers on this machine. But I'll drop down to 800 and try the 65k colors mode to be sure.

Yes, in 65k mode (800x600) it looks ok. I need both a better video card and any sound card, to use this old NT machine to its full capacity, but I won't get either because I am waiting for either OQO or the newly announced Antelope wearable/portable. Why spend more money on obsolete technology? (-8

Guess I'll stay in 800x700 65k color to browse with K-Meleon from now on. Thanks, all.