Web-Safe Colours

What are web-safe colours? 

The diagram below illustrates the 216 web-safe, or browser-safe, colours.  These are the only colours that can be displayed reliably across all browsers and operating systems running at 8-bit colour depth  (i.e. the colours will not dither or band when used to display areas of flat colour).

If non-web-safe colours are used for areas of flat colour, unsightly dithering can occur when a page designed for a pc is viewed on a Mac, or when a page designed in Internet Explorer is viewed in Netscape Navigator.

The web-safe palette is based on mathematics, rather than aesthetics, and comprises all colours with red, green and blue decimal values of 0, 51, 102, 153, 204 and 255 ( or 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, FF in hex).

Rather than displaying the web-safe colours in terms of hue, saturation or luminance, the diagram displays the colours in a format that allows colour patterns and complementary colour combinations to be more easily identified.

To see how these colours appear as background and text colours, view the web-safe colours table.