Not just the web: PC colour is totally and utterly broken. The web is just a small part of this.

There's an entire field of colour management that Microsoft, Linux, and Google are carefully ignoring. They'll occasionally stumble upon ICC colour spaces, HDR, or 10-bit, but they make sure to break everything even worse and leave it like that forever.

Sigh... I have gone on the same rant annually since about 2010, starting on Slashdot. Most recently on YCombinator News in 2021. It's a whole new year, time to repeat my rant and pray to the IT gods that someone at Microsoft or Google stumbles upon this:

The current year is 2022. The future. We have these amazing display technologies such as OLED, HDR, and quantum dots. In this sci-fi fantasy world I cannot do any of the following:

- Send a photo in any format better than an SDR sRGB JPEG in the general case, such as an email attachment, document, or chat message. These are 30 year old standards, by the way.

- Send a photo in any format and expect colour reproduction to be even vaguely correct. Wide-gamut is especially pointless. It is near certain that the colours will be stretched to the monitor gamut in an unmanaged way. People will look either like clowns or zombies depending on the remote display device, operating system, software, and settings.

- Send a photo in 10-bit and expect an improvement in image quality when displayed.

- Expect any industry-wide take-up of any new image encoding format. It is a certainty that each vendor will do their "own thing", refuse to even acknowledge the existence of their competitors, and guarantee that whatever they come up with will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Remind me... can ANY software written by Microsoft or Google save a HEIF/HEIC file? No... because it's an "Apple" format. Even most Microsoft software can't read or write their own JPEG-XR format, let alone Google or Apple. Netflix developed AVIF but I'm yet to see it taken up by any mainstream system. Etc...

New in 2022:

- Display HDR on Linux.

- Display HDR even vaguely correctly on Windows. I mean, good try, but simply clipping highlights without even attempting to implement tone mapping is just plain wrong.

- Use a colour calibrator device on Windows 11, which totally broke this functionality.

- Use a colour calibrator device for calibrating a HDR display. I have a device that can measure up to 2000 nits. Can I use this calibrate my HDR OLED laptop display? No. That's not an option.

- Turn on HDR in Windows 11 and not have it cause a downside such as restricting the display gamut to sRGB.

- Use HDR in any desktop application for GUI controls.

- Use colour management for any desktop application for GUI controls that isn't an Electron application -- the only platform that does this vaguely correctly under Windows by default.

Things have even regressed over the last few years! Windows 10 Photo viewer could do colour management -- badly. It would show an unmanaged picture at first, and then overwrite it with the colour managed picture a bit later, so you get colour flickering as you scroll through your photos. Okay, fine, at least it was trying. Windows 11 does not try. It just assumes 8-bit sRGB for everything.

Similarly, the 14 year old WPF framework supported wide gamut, 16-bit linear compositing, and HDR. The "latest & greatest" Win UI 3 framework... 8-bit SDR sRGB only.