331074 - Nearest neighbor algorithm used when downscaling images makes text and graphs unreadable.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 98971

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Emanuel Landeholm]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20060309 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20060309 Firefox/1.0.7

See #98971, filed at 2001-09-09 09:59 PST, a *major* bug that hasn't been fixed in five years.

I browse sites daily that contain downscaled gifs and pngs which look outright horrible. You might argue that the fault resides with the web page designers but so what? There is a simple fix called bicubic interpolation which should be used in the browser.

I'm really, really tired of having to resort to "view image" on resized images that contain text or graphs when the scaled versions are unreadable due to the
very poor choice of interpolation algorithm.

Please ditch nearest neigbor in favor of something workable!


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start browser.
2. Go to any site that uses downscaled gifs or pngs containing text or other high contrast images. There are lots of them, believe me.

Actual Results:  
Unreadable text, figures and graphs.

Expected Results:  
Readable text, figures and graphs.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 98971 ***

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan]

Just because a bug is old does not mean it won't be fixed for upcoming releases. It won't be changed for firefox 2 but the core that Firefox 3 is using is getting a full graphics rewrite and may have enough improvements that a more elegant downscaling algrothim will be used.

Comment 3

[Emanuel Landeholm]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Just because a bug is old does not mean it won't be fixed for upcoming
> releases. It won't be changed for firefox 2 but the core that Firefox 3 is
> using is getting a full graphics rewrite and may have enough improvements that
> a more elegant downscaling algrothim will be used.
> 

Okay, that sounds great! I have searched extensively but all I could find was the old bug report and the discussion that followed.

Comment 4

[Emanuel Landeholm]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Just because a bug is old does not mean it won't be fixed for upcoming
> releases. It won't be changed for firefox 2 but the core that Firefox 3 is
> using is getting a full graphics rewrite and may have enough improvements that
> a more elegant downscaling algrothim will be used.
> 

In the meantime, what about providing users with an option to disregard downscaling width and height attributes in gifs and pngs in about:config? I'm very tempted to write a proxy server that does the equivalent but I would really prefer not having to take the trouble.

Comment 5

[HyperHacker]

(In reply to comment #4)
> In the meantime, what about providing users with an option to disregard
> downscaling width and height attributes in gifs and pngs in about:config? I'm
> very tempted to write a proxy server that does the equivalent but I would
> really prefer not having to take the trouble.

Programs such as Proxomitron can do this. A quick and dirty method would be to match anything in "<img*>" and replace "width=|height=" with "blah=" (no quotes in any of them); the browser will just ignore the unrecognized attribute.