What is the Web Safe Palette?

The palette that browsers use when displaying colors on a 256 color display is referred to as the Web palette, and is also known as the "browser-safe" or "web-safe" color palette. Any color that exists in within these 216 colors will be displayed correctly on 256 color displays on either a Windows or Macintosh machine.

This Web Safe palette was created to represent a broad range of colors across the red, green and blue spectrum. They were not chosen randomly, but instead are based on a mathematical function that mixes parts of red, green and blue. Simply, any color in the web palette has one of six shades of red, six shades of green, and six shades of blue.

Unfortunately, colors that do not conform to the web safe palette will dither. Large areas of dithered color are disgusting to look at, as the computer will intersperse colors from within the available palette in the image to simulate the missing colors. If you were to have a full color image on your web site, and the visitor had their colors set to 256, then the image would dither.

Here is an example of dithering:

Original - No Dithering	Optimized - Dithering

There are ways for you, the designer to control dithering, including:

• Optimizing your images
• Convert to a different format (JPG or GIF to control colors)

The good news is that most modern computers are set to default at more than 256 colors, usually 16 bit (16 million) or higher. A computer with a higher color setting will display (most likely) the colors without dithering.

So, you may be asking yourself: If most computers are set to default at higher than 256, why should I worry about the web safe palette? Can't I just ignore it now?

No.

Users can intentionally set their browsers to a lower resolution to save memory and improve the performance of their computers. Many businesses do not allow their employees to modify the properties of their video displays and may default at 256. Many video cards cannot display millions of colors at high resolutions, and the user has cranked up their display.

The only way that you can be 100% sure that the colors you are using will look the same on other computer screens.