Using Windows 95, viewer.exe can't display the background image Xoom uses on their home page - it's at http://media.xoom.com/NovLook/mainbackground.gif if you'd like to load it directly. It does display using the same app under NT 4 - but only with >256 colors. This is probably related to other problems with displaying colors that aren't in the standard 256 colors - some pale yellows also dither to white (as seems to be happening here).

batch-reassigning all Garrett Blythe bugs to Don Melton

Re-assigned to pnunn@netscape.com. Pam, who should get this one? Someone in layout?

Nope. I'll handle it. sounds like the color cube. -pn

Yep. Its the colorcube. An 8bit colormapped display has 256 colors to display everything. The browser can display many images on a page and has to have a small set of colors to display all the images at once, even though each image could use a radically different set of colors. Or to say it another way, the browser has to take the colormaps of all the images on a page and find the best colormap of 216 colors for all of the images on that page. Analyzing the page takes time. To speed up the display of images, he browser uses a standard colorcube for all colormapped images. This does limit the number of colors available. Most images can be displayed with the 6x6x6 colorcube and dithering. In this instance, the color of the design in the image is matching a colorcube color that just happens to match the ground color it is displayed on. For greys, we have the following colors: (Red, Green, Blue): (00,00,00), (51,51,51), (102,102,102), (153,153,153), (204,204,204), (255,255,255) Making the design color alittle darker would make it match (204,204,204) and display on colormapped displays.

Got it. Thanks for the excellent explanation of what's going on, pnunn!