Another thing to keep in mind is that the majority of users are now using displays with palettes more than the standard 256-color palette, which is good news for us designers. That s where the Optimized palette option comes in handy in GIF Image Optimizer. We re still working with up to 256 colors, but only those colors that seem the most relevant to the image. You might end up with a larger image size sometimes a little larger but other times much larger than using the browser-safe palette. This can be overcome to some degree by tweaking the settings in GIF Image Optimizer and you might even get it close to the file size if you were to use the browser-safe palette.
Experimentation is key here.
As a side note, keep also in mind the 256-color value chart shown here. This chart is for formulating colors in either RGB or HEX techniques and guarantees that they won t dither when viewed in a 256-color palette on anyone s monitor. Note that 185 is not part of the 256-Color Value formula.