Web Safe Color Palette
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The web safe color palette lays out all 216 colours of the browser safe cube — every combination of 0, 51, 102, 153, 204 and 255 — as one grid of swatches.
What is Web Safe Color Palette?
The page is a single grid: two hundred and sixteen coloured squares, six across on a narrow screen and twelve across on a wide one. Each square is one of the browser safe values, and each carries its hex code in a hover tooltip; there are no labels in the grid and no copy buttons, so this reads as a reference chart rather than a working palette.
The set is built by taking six channel values — zero, fifty-one, one hundred and two, one hundred and fifty-three, two hundred and four and two hundred and fifty-five — and combining them in every order. Six values to the third power is two hundred and sixteen, and the arrangement is the classic Netscape color cube: a regular lattice in which neighbouring squares differ by exactly one step in a single channel, which is why each band reads as a gradient of one primary.
Structurally the grid is a map of RGB space. Read left to right and the red channel climbs in six steps; move down and the green channel does the same; the blue channel changes in blocks. Any colour in the set can be described by three indices rather than by a hex string, which is why designers once kept the cube in their heads. As a web safe color palette it is also a reminder of how coarse those two hundred and sixteen values are: two neighbouring squares can differ by so little that no modern display would call them distinct.
- The historical reason for the cube was dithering.
- Displays that could not render arbitrary colours approximated them by mixing pixels from a fixed palette, and staying on the grid avoided both the dithering and the banding that came with it.
- Modern screens render millions of colours and nothing outside the cube is unsafe any more, so this is a reference rather than a constraint — the name survives because the set is still a clean, evenly spaced lattice.
That even spacing is what keeps it useful. Because every step is a fixed fifty-one in one channel, the cube is a dependable source of colours that differ by predictable amounts: handy for building a ramp with no surprises, for choosing two clearly distinct values without hunting for widely varying hues, or for checking a colour against a coarse grid.
What the gaps cost is worth stating. Two hundred and sixteen colours contain no vivid modern hue and nothing near the saturated ends of the wheel, so an accent chosen in OKLCH will almost never be in here. The grid also has no search, no way to enter a colour and find its nearest safe value, no labels and no copy interaction, so a value taken from it has to be read from the tooltip and typed by hand.
- Within those bounds, as a browser safe hex reference it is what the name promises: 216 web safe colors in a lattice, useful as a websafe color chart and as a reminder of what the netscape color cube actually contained.
- Anyone who needs a value from it reads the hex from a hover tooltip, so visible labels and copy buttons are the obvious next step for anyone leaning on it regularly.
How to use Web Safe Color Palette
- Scan the grid for the region you want — each band steps one primary channel by fifty-one.
- Hover a square to read its hex value.
- Type the value into your file, since the swatches themselves do not copy.
When to use Web Safe Color Palette vs related tools
Use this when you need a fixed, evenly spaced palette for a reference or a constrained system — retro interfaces, quick ramps, teaching the cube. Use the colour picker or the palette generators when the requirement is a modern colour rather than a browser safe one. The nearest value in another fixed set is what the nearest named color finder answers, and the other classic fixed reference is the CSS named colors reference.
Privacy & Security
This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.