267631 - Firefox desktop icon looks totally grainy after upgrade to 1.0RC2 or 1.0

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jeroen Boomgaardt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041103 Firefox/1.0RC2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041103 Firefox/1.0RC2

The Firefox desktop icon (the application shhortcut) looks totally grainy after
upgrading from 1.0RC1 to RC2. It seems to be a dithered rendering using a
primary color scheme.

This happens on Windows NT, using 24-bit color settings. All other desktop icons
look fine. Firefox 1.0RC1 did not show this problem.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Firefox 1.0RC2 on Windowns NT
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Firefox desktop icon looks totally grainy

Comment 1

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

please dont' set flags if you don't know how. the "+" flags are reserved for the
project team.

Comment 2

[Carlo 'Carcarlo' Carmagnini]

I notice that too on Windows 98. The desktop Firefox icon has a "mosaic-style"
as it doesn't degrade gracefully with transparency. 1.0RC1 icon was good. The
one of RC2 is very ugly.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041103 Firefox/1.0RC2

Comment 3

[Carolyn Scheppner]

I agree.  I have a Windows NT4 system with desktop set to 1024x768 65536 colors.

The Firefox desktop icon became became very roughly dithered/grainy when I
upgraded from the 1.0 pre-release to 1.0 release.  It looked fine before that.

Did someone redo the icon using colors not available on our desktops?

Carolyn

Comment 4

[Jeroen Boomgaardt]

Attachment: Desktop icon on NT4, at 24-bit color setting

Comment 5

[Wolfgang Beyer]

I think I just found the solution: In Windows NT and 2000 by the desktop context
menu there is a configuration "show symbols with maximum number of colors" (or
something like that – I am using a german version). After activating that all
icons look perfect. especially the firefox icon looks extremely bad without this
configuration. Therefor the solution should be mentioned somewhere in the
installation guide as a hint for Win 2000 and NT users.

Internally it is the registry entry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control
Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\"Shell Icon BPP"= which should be set from "4" to "16". 

By the way 2 further bug descriptions deal with this problem:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269463
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=270674

Comment 6

[Martin Dawson]

(In reply to comment #5)
I tried what you suggested, but I'm already set to "Show icons using all
possible colors".  However, I'm beginning to think this is a computer problem on
my end, as all my icons are similarly dithered--it's just most obvious with the
Firefox icon.

Comment 7

[Paul Rogers]

I just installed Firefox-1.0.1 on Win95 with 16-bit color and found this effect.
 The icons presented when I tried to change the icon, using the properties
window looked OK, but all got pixelized on the desktop.  Incidentally, I have v
1.0PR from an installation, when that was released, that has a good looking icon.

Comment 8

[Jeroen Boomgaardt]

(In reply to comment #5)

I can confirm that the workaround to set "show symbols with maximum number of
colors" does solve the ugly look. However that is not the default setting on my
NT system and all other application icons look fine without setting that option.
Apperently one of the icon variants was dropped in between 1.0RC1 to RC2,
causing Firefox to look as the ugliest one on my desktop... Shouldn't be that
hard to re-include that specific icon variant?

Comment 9

[José Jeria]

*** Bug 269463 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[José Jeria]

*** Bug 270674 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Carolyn Scheppner]

Couldn't you just install the older icon on older OS's?

Here is how the current one looks on my system (NT 4.0 1024x768 65536 colors)

http://www.chesco.com/~carolyn/gfx/firefoxicon.bmp

All of my other icons look acceptable (and I have about 3 dozen icons on my
desktop).

The old Firefox icon (before release 1.0) looked great on my system.

Carolyn

Comment 12

[Martin Dawson]

(In reply to comment #8)

This workaround does not work for me.

Comment 13

[Carolyn Scheppner]

I do not want to change global color usage on my screen just so the Firefox icon does not look bad.  All of my other icons look fine, and the Firefox icon looks so dithered - not pretty.  I agree this change suddenly appeared in one of the earlier updates (see first message).  Prior to that the icon looked fine.

Carolyn

Comment 14

[Martin Dawson]

(In reply to comment #12)

To be more clear, I am already set to "all possible colors"; I'm running at 32 bits but I still have the 4 bit icon.  Toggling the "all possible colors" checkbox has no effect and the mentioned registry entry is already set to 16.  
I'm using Windows 2000 SP4 at 1024x768 resolution.

Comment 15

[Carlo 'Carcarlo' Carmagnini]

I think this bug was solved with FF 1.5. I had no more problems with Win 98 and I also tested on Win 2000.

Comment 16

[Carolyn Scheppner]

Unfortunately I no longer have Windows NT on my work machine where I had the grainy icon problem so I cannot check if it is fixed.

Comment 17

[Martin Dawson]

The problem does indeed seem fixed under 1.5.  Great job, guys!

Comment 18

[José Jeria]

Based on comments

Comment 19

[José Jeria]

Based on comments