KaiSchaller.com

As it turns out, the problem had nothing to do with web-safe color palettes but rather with how Safari renders PNG files. This would explain why Google searches for “safari web colors” didn’t turn up a single helpful site. Searching for “safari png,” however, leads us to plenty of information.

The article The Sad Story of PNG Gamma “Correction” does a good job of explaining what is going on, if you’re interested. As a curious side note: I browsed a few of the blog entries addressing this and saw that Andy Budd had commented on one of them and linked the same article I just did. In case you don’t remember from a few posts back, that’s the guy who wrote the book I’m reading. Small world :-P

I’m just glad I got this figured out. Feels good to solve problems on your own.

For some reason Safari doesn’t like displaying colors that aren’t included in the web-safe palette. This is both odd and incredibly inconvenient when trying to implement gradient backgrounds for a site. I’ll have to do some research and see what’s going on.