Necessity of Websafe Colours?

tania721's picture

They have: 39 posts

Joined: Aug 2001

Bearing in mind I'm new to this, but how much of a necessity would you say websafe colours are now? As more and more people assume most surfers have at least 800x600 resolution (thus not designing with 640x480 in mind), can the same be said for true colours?

And if not, anyone know of any good shareware out there that colour matches? I've tried Photoshop but i don't like the colours and can't get good matches. Just wondered whether its worth the trouble trying to pick safe colours.

`Imagination is more important than Knowledge' ~ Albert Einstein

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

this is from two of my old sites tracker:
(screen colors)

16 Bit (65K) 57.01%
32 Bit (16.7M) 29.65%
24 Bit (16.7M) 10.44%
8 Bit (256) 2.60%
Other 0.25%

and

16 Bit (65K) 53.08%
32 Bit (16.7M) 21.10%
24 Bit (16.7M) 10.47%
8 Bit (256) 9.83%
Other 5.50%

if that gives you an idea of what people use, others may have bigger, varied results.

I use PSP (paint shop pro), I really like the eye dropper for matching colors, however the colors can change slightly when compressed (saved as .jpg), but a trick with .jpg is never save it more than once, always work on a .bmp etc then when finished save as .jpg, resaving a .jpg will continue to compress it.

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Webmonkey had an article awhile back that talked about how websafe colours aren't even truly websafe! I think they found something like 22 colours that always worked properly.

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/index2a.html?tw=design

With all the different colour settings and calibration possibilities I figure that I'm never going to get something to look exactly as I want it on every machine (and that goes with browsers and screen resolutions too!). I usually start a design with websafe but I don't worry too much if I end up using some that aren't. As long as it's usable some minor variations in design don't bother me.

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