Two shades of beige - 5 of 6

Another example:

I asked OS8 to pick me a swatch of web-safe beige in Photoshop: then I clicked again straight away and asked OS8 picker what color it was - guess what? I got a different answer. Not a big difference, just red 248 instead of 255, 3% - but does this mean that the Mac OS is working with a margin of 3% error? What if this gets compounded after that, building on 3% several times in a row?

But it didn't seem to - I got the same answer every time, so it sounds like a design decision...

Then I had a look round at some other programs - you could spend days doing this.

I asked Freehand what colors Photoshop had used in a little graphic item, and it told the same tale as Photoshop. But there was no solidarity: Photoshop said that FreeHand's little square of web-safe beige, exported as a pict, was something else, 255.212.174 - here the difference between the blue values were the same as between Photoshop's picker and OS8's, the difference between the greens was a little different...