What Color Space to choose for viewing jpegs on a monitor

After reading many webpages and watching many tutorial videos about which color space to use, I get odd results.  I understand that sRGB is more for web applications, and that Adobe RGB 1998 has a wider gamut, and that ProPhoto has the widest gamut of colors, particularly helpful with printing.
However, in LR 4, when I export to jpeg as sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto, the differences are very noticeable.  sRGB looks the most vibrant, Adobe RGB looks flat, and ProPhoto looks dark with a greenish cast.  I expected ProPhoto to look best, or is that only for printing, and I have to process differently?
What am I misunderstanding here?  TIA.

It depends on three factors:
1. The monitor - normal, which means with a gamut close to sRGB, or "wide gamut" with a gamut that approaches Adobe RGB (and today there are plenty of medium priced "wide gamut" monitors).
2. The viewing application and whether it is color managed. In a nutshell, color management translates the image color numbers to eqivalent color numbers in the monitor's color space.
3. Whether the monitor is calibrated and profiled. In order for color management to work properly the application must know what the image's color space is (embedded profile) and what the monitor's space is (monitor profile). Any display on the monitor is always in the monitor space, but in order for the display to be accurate the translation must be made.
If all three conditions are fulfilled, alll images, no matter what their spaces are, will be displayed more or less the same because they have all been translated to the same display space. I say "more or less" because if the image is in a wide space that needs to be compressed to fit in the monitor space, there may be slight differences in the way colors that are out-of-gamut for the monitor are rendered, but the differences are slight.
Without those three factors, only images in the space closest to your monitor's native space will be properly displayed. So if you have a "normal" monitor, choose sRGB and if you have a "wide gamut" monitor, go with Adobe RGB, but keep in mind that other people with "normal" monitors and without color managed browsers/viewers will not see it properly.

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