I wanted to like IE9, I really did: it is very fast and has a number of useful built-in security features.

Unfortunately, it is next to useless if you are a photographer and want to see images on a wide-gamut monitor – something photographers usually have – with anything like accurate colours.

All wide-gamut monitors come with colour profiles that Windows can use to correctly display colour information. Unfortunately Microsoft has never used these profiles in any of its version of Internet Explorer; instead it uses a default sRGB profile – IE9 is no exception. This results in every image appearing super-saturated on a wide-gamut monitor. Ironically, Microsoft trumpets IE9’s ability to correctly extract  embedded colour profiles from images – but it then proceeds to nullify its efforts by displaying the image using an sRGB profile, regardless of the monitor.

Firefox has used monitor colour profiles for some time, so it’s back to Firefox for me.

For example. This is what Ava should look like:

And this is how IE9 displays her on a wide gamut monitor:

Update: I just installed Firefox 4.0 RC1 and it seems to be as fast – or almost as fast – as IE9. And the colours are right. Lot’s of other improvements, too.