Closed Bug 485694 Opened 15 years ago Closed 14 years ago

Firefox image rendering is flawed

Categories

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Product:
Core
Component:
Graphics
Version:
1.9.1 Branch
Platform:
x86
Linux
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
major

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 411831

People

(Reporter: mp-t01, Unassigned)

Details

Attachments

(3 files, 1 obsolete file)

Image file for reduced html
23.97 KB, image/jpeg
Details
Screen shot of problem
82.91 KB, image/jpeg
Details
testcase
239 bytes, text/html
Details 
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8

I get to observe a lot of machines with different operating systems. I note that Firefox (version 3.0 and up) will not render images in the same way or not at all depending on one or more of 1) the html / css code used 2) the aspect ratios of monitors 3) the video card families 4) the computer brand. No other browser that I have tested has the same problems and the problems are common as a simple google search using the words firefox and images will reveal. I have seen people reject firefox because they find on first try that it will not work on their computer. I do not understand why these problems are not receiving top priority. I estimate that thousands of potential firefox customers have rejected it for image related reasons introduced with firefox 3.0 and continued into all upgrades since. Yesterday I found, for example, that firefox could not display an image on some computers if the web site used the "height" command in their "img src" code. This is clearly a fault with the firefox rendering engine because the code is valid html and always has been. 

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go to a place with a variety of computers with various standard monitors, brands and operating systems
2.Install firefox 3
3.Start browsing and watch the differences
Actual Results:  
Image rendition works sometimes and not others. 

Expected Results:  
Like all other browers, image rendition works 99.99% of the time. 

Display properly. Note: This bug is filed because there is not evidence that anyone at firefox is looking into the problem. Almost all of the image related problems in bugzilla continue to remain unassigned and, as far as I am concerned, they are serving to kill ff popularity.
Please give more detailed information, a testcase, or at least an URL with the problem.
http://new.quality.mozilla.org/bug-writing-guidelines
Thanks!
Well, I do not how to answer this. If I search google with the words "firefox images not", I get over 58 million hits. If I search the bugzilla site, I get over 100 problems with images. I have seen the problems on windows, linux and apple computers. I have tried at least 2 dozen of the solutions proposed by various sites from my searches. I have analysed the html that does not display correctly and have found that it is always the case that the "img src" statement in the html contains a "height =" modifier that the problem occurs. I have also noted that the problem related to monitors and aspect ratios. It occurs most frequently with the newer wide and large lcd monitors. If it were not for the fact that I like some of firefox features, I would not bother because no other browser that I have tried has the same problems with displaying images. In my store were have all kinds of computers and monitors so I cannot take any more time to examine the problem. I thought that the firefox people would take the time because as I see it they are losing a lot of firefox users. Basically, if in the first 10 minutes of trying Firefox it is found to be filled with problems, the users will not file a bug report, they will just toss it. And, this is happening a lot. The most I can do for you at this stage is send some screen shots. Note - I also have Vista machines and not one has had the problem. The problem occurs with XP rarely, Win2K sometimes, Apple Safari frequently, and Linux often. The problem did not exist in Firefox 2 and I do not know what changed to make such a difference. I hope someone at Firefox does.
Screen shots won't help. Maybe a duplicate of Bug 449357 ?
Do you see this with 3.5.3 or later (improvements have been made to CSS), and then give a link at the least.
I have stopped using Firefox on the machines on which I had trouble. Opera, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Geko, Google, and every other browser that I have tried have no problems. It is a Firefox only issue. I now find that Firefox seems ok on Vista and XP. Maybe they fixed something - I do not know. I have read on a number of sites that Firefox is not interested in the Linux market and that many have had the problem. Apparently if one wants to use Firefox under Linux (and some Apple boxes), some would recommend running Firefox for Windows under a Windows emulator - like Wine. I uninstalled Firefox 3 from my Linux box and reinstalled Firefox 2. It works fine. One of the most troublesome sites for Firefox 3 was drudgereport.com. Most of the images at that site came up black or mostly out of sight. Also, as I previously noted, monitor size seems to be a factor. Firefox 3 failed miserably with the newer large, 22", monitors - I got the idea that it was a coordinates problem - as if the image was display behind the background. The strange thing though, if one right clicked on any of the non-appearing images and selected "view image" from the drop down list, then the image would appear just fine in a new window - but, it would not appear in the page where it was supposed to. I now us Firefox just to use Xmarks to transfer bookmarks between machines and then I load the transferred bookmarks into another browser. I preferred Firefox features but can no longer continue to play around with it.
I forgot to mention that the problem still occurs using Firefox 3.5.3 on my Linux box running Slackware 12.2. I have noted from the Ubuntu support site that those users are having problems as well.
http://drudgereport.com/ shows just fine for me. I think you may have some extension that is messing with this, so please create a new profile, and try testing. http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles
No. I already tried that. Raw Firefox without extensions and add-ons has the problem. What OS and what monitor size and video card are you using. I am using a Samsung 22" and a GeForce 9800 card.
I use Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20090913 Minefield/3.7a1pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) ID:20090913050738 on a 15 inch widescreen (ATI mobility Radeon 4300HD), 3.5.3 with vista on a 15 inch (Nvidia geforce, not sure on model, not on it right now :) and 3.5.3 on windows xp with a 19 inch widescreen (ATI radeon 9600). I don't see any problems with any of these, but please give a screenshot and link.
Severity: critical → major
Version: unspecified → 3.5 Branch
Some open Linux bugs are e.g. Bug 411831, Bug 476282, Bug 468496. I have no Linux to test. And personally I have never seen image problems on Windows, except with test builds of course, but never in releases. Some people saw Bug 497363 which was a 3.5 bug but that should be fixed now.
Troublesome without testcase and without Linux :) 
You can change Platform to Linux if you think it only affects Linux now.
If you upload a testcase or give at least a link Linux people can try to determine the cause of the problem , without that nothing can be done.
OS: All → Linux
Ok. I have just discovered something interesting as a result of this request. When I printed the web page to a pdf file, all the images appeared perfectly even though they do not appear on the screen. When I do a screen print, which Linux saves as an eps file, the eps file appears without the images just like the screen. Since Linux uses encapsulated postscript to display, this might be the source of the problem. The images that I need to upload are too large to upload here, so I will be soon creating an ftp location and placing the images there. I will post the ftp address here when it is done. This should take me a few hours.
Maybe it would be best to test it first with the latest trunk build to make sure that it isn't already fixed:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/
Well, I downloaded the lastest, 3.7pre, and installed it. It will not run. The script reports an error in line 143 indicating that the variable $prog has not been resolved. I do not have time to debug this further because the problem is deeper - probably some library issues that the developer will best be able to solve.
So, if you care to see the problem I have created an ftp directory which I will delete in a few days. To access it use hostname ftpserver.acanac.com, username bugzilla@bt4bx55z.ftpserver.acanac.com and password bugzilla.
This will access the following files for down load:
1) BourqueCom.eps which shows a screen shot of the website www.bourque.com. Note that some images appear while others do not 
2) BourqueComBot.eps which shows a screen show of the bottom half of the same page
3) DrudgeBotSep10.eps which shows the bottom of site drudge.com
4) DrudgePicSep11.eps which shows that right clicking on the top blackened image on the site and selecting "show image" does display the image even though it did not appear on the full page.
5) DrudgeTopSep9.eps the top of the same web page - note: the number 9 in the file name is not the date but the result of the automatic printscreen numbering.
6) Drudgetop.pdf with shows the same drudge.com site put as printed to a pdf file - note that in this case the images appear fine.

Let me know what is next. Have fun.
CC-ing some people who might want take a look at this.
Component: General → Layout
Product: Firefox → Core
QA Contact: general → layout
Version: 3.5 Branch → 1.9.1 Branch
Martin: Sadly, there's not a lot we can do at this end, if we can't reproduce the bug :-(

Since you *can* see the bug, perhaps you could try reducing a testcase from a broken page?  That could definitely be helfpful in figuring out what's wrong.  More info: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Reducing_testcases

Also, it sounds like perhaps the problem with your mozilla-central build might be that you're running 32-bit Firefox on a 64-bit machine without the ia32 libraries...  See this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/bluewhite64-80/firefox-3.5.2-745202/
Two solutions to that would be:
 - download the "linux-x86_64.tar.bz2" version of mozilla-central
 OR
 - download the "linux-i686.tar.bz2" version (which I presume you did before), and run it *after* you install your platform's ia32 libraries. (not sure how on slackware) If that works, please let us know if you can still reproduce this problem on the latest mozilla-central build.
(In reply to comment #6)
> I have noted from the Ubuntu support site
> that those users are having problems as well.

Can you provide links to the issues on these Ubuntu support sites?  I'm running Ubuntu on 4 machines, and I haven't hit this problem, but I'd be interested in investigating what other Ubuntu users are running into.
I could find no time yesterday but I am today able to get to it. 

1) I will be trying the test case route
2) The 32 bit libraries are installed. I am using a 64 bit machine and I have tried both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the nighly build 3.7. Neither work. I do not get the same message as noted in the link in the above suggestion. My message is " $prog not found. From this I gather that the script is not properly locating the firefox program. I do some script analysis to try to find out why.
3) I googled with "firefox 3 images not show linux ubuntu" and found a number of references to others with the same problem. Here is one such link http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=839799
Ok. I got the latest build, 3.7pre, running. The problem was a library reference in the script - Slackware uses /usr/lib and not /usr/local/lib.

I am using 3.7 now. The problem has not been solved. I have uploaded two new screen shots of Drudge.com to my ftp site. The file names are test2.jpg and test3.jpg. 

Note that there is something different - some images are partially appearing whereas they did not appear before. This again makes me think that it has something to do with a display coordinate problem; the images are displayed behind the background sometimes in the right place and sometimes not - just guessing however. If I right click on an image that does not appear and select "view image", the image comes up fine on a page by itself. 

Once again, my temporary ftp site is:
hostname ftpserver.acanac.com 
username bugzilla@bt4bx55z.ftpserver.acanac.com 
password bugzilla.
Hi,
I am trying to reduce a testcase for this. How does one save "webpage complete". I cannot find that option anywhere. 
Thanks.
right click on the page, then click save page as..., then save
Please ignor this last post. I found it.

The same problem occurs. Only if the html referring to the source image is deleted from the html file does the problem cease for that particular image. 

However, I have noticed something that I did not notice before, which occurs in both the online version and the downloaded version:

If I right click on a blacked out image and then click anywhere else on the page to cancel the right click menu, a part of the image will suddenly appear where I had right clicked. Then, if I do the same on a part of the image remains black, then another piece of the image will appear. I can continue this until the whole image is visible. The size and shape of the part of the image that reappears with each right click varies. Does this provide a clue to anyone? 

I cannot screen print and upload this because as soon as I hit the "print screen" button the image returns to black. I guess that the print screen forces a refresh. 

I have uploaded the entire set of files for this to my ftp site mentioned above into the directory name "Webpage". Does someone at Mozilla experience the same problem as me with these files? 

Thanks again.
Another test result:
Scrolling the page with the mouse wheel up and down cause different parts of the images to appear on successive scrolls. However, there does not seem to be a pattern; the parts that appear are not the same each time.
Can you upload the testcase (which has a minimum of code and still shows the issue) here as an attachment? Look at the top of the comment section for the Add and attachment section
Ok. I got something. Removing the width="200" statement from the "img src=" line allows the image to appear completely. However, the size of the image is too big for the page. Changing the width value does cause the black box to appear in different sizes but the image still does not appear. Using a "height" statement to replace the width statement makes no different - the image still does not appear in the same way. It seems that there is no problem with images that are gif files or images called by a script file. So far, it is only the jpg files that show the problem. 

I have placed two screen prints at my ftp site. The first, test5.jpg, shows the web page with the width statement removed from the jpg of Obama's wife. The second shows it with the width statement put back in - only a black box appears. 

Any more test suggestions? To me it seems that nothing else affects the display problem. Note that it occurs only if the image reference is within an html file.
Ok. I am attaching the reduced files - there is nothing to them. Just a five line html file that contains only the image statement from the Drudge Report in the body. I am also including a screen shot, test7.jpg, and the image file itself, capt.jpg. To run the html the location of the jpg file will have to be changed in the html to where it is put. Again the image does not appear for me.

I have now determined that monitors do not matter. I have plugged in a 15" crt and it shows the same blanked image as my 22" lcd. 

If it matters: I am using Slackware linux 12.2 - current stable version. This comes with xorg 1.4.2 for xwindow display. The kernel is 2.6.26.7 which is very recent. However, this should not be an issue because I had the problem before the upgrade to this kernel. And, not that from a Google search people with other Linux versions have the same problem. From what I gather they tend to abandon Firefox for any other browser - as far as can determine no other browser (including Firefox 2 - any release before FF3) has the problem.
Attached file Html file which produces problem (obsolete) — 
run with capt.jpg as explained in my last post.

    
    

    
  

      
      
      
      

        Attached image
          
        Screen shot of problem
        — 
      

    


  
The image appears as a black box. However, if I remove the width= statement from the html and rerun it, the image appears fine in its normal size.

    
    

    
  

      
      
      
      

        Attached file
          
        testcase
        — 
      

    


  
(In reply to comment #26)
> Html file which produces problem
> 
> run with capt.jpg as explained in my last post.

Generally it's best to attach the image file first, and then modify your HTML to refer to the image's URL, and _then_ attach your HTML testcase.  That way, it can be viewed live on bugzilla, with no need for the viewer to download & modify.

I've made that change to your testcase so that others don't have to, and I'm re-uploading it.  Can you verify that you still see the problem with this version?

        Attachment #401460 -
        Attachment is obsolete: true

    
    

    
  
OK. This can be marked as resolved. Also, bug 414928 has to be corrected. It was marked as resolved but the reason is incorrect. Also, bug 307821 is resolved by the solution I am giving. 

Being frustrated on the weekend, I continued to try to get this problem solved. After all, I like Firefox. As luck would have it, I found this site where the author has found the source of the problem, as well as the source of some other FF rendering problems: http://www.ab9il.net/linux/firefox-3-xconf.html

Now, a bit of explanation. The author of this site uses an ATI Radeon. I use a NVidia 9500. Bug 414928 refers to the problem as a Radeon problem and gives a solution. Radeon is not the problem; it has to be occuring with all high end video cards - unless they switch to simple vesa mode. The problem disappeared as soon as I added  Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true" to my graphics device section, as advised and explained on the web site.

Since I do not use a Radeon card my full device section now reads:
Section "Device"
 Identifier  "Card0"
 Driver      "nv"
 VendorName  "EVGA Corporation"
 BoardName   "Geforce 9500 GT"
 BusID       "PCI:2:0:0"
 VideoRam    2048000000
 Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
EndSection

Everything now works great. However, I am not sure how Bugzilla staff should be handling this. Clearly, many have had the problem. Some web sites advise abandoning FF on Linux, and many have, or using the Windows version under Wine on Linux. This, by the way, works because Windows intercepts and waters down the monitor instructions to he lowest common denominator - vesa. Adding the above option to the section may have to be included as a part of the installation instructions for FF on Linux and gives the crispest and clearest FF images I have ever seen anywhere.
Component: Layout → Graphics
QA Contact: layout → thebes

    
    

    
  
Looking today a bit deeper to understand this situation, it would appear from the X-org notes that the purpose of setting no off screen pixmaps is that some programmers will set up their screen drawing routines to store to video card memory and to the heap or screen memory. This is the source of the problem. It interesting that MS Windows does not care. It does its own thing regardless what the programmer asks. This may explain why the FF3 problem does not appear in the MS world. However, the XAA, X windows Advanced Acceleration protocol, is now outdated and generally deemed unnecessary unless a programmer is using an old library. I understand that something called the EXA protcol has replaced it, somewhat. But even then, EXA is only interim in the effort to improve graphic rendering. In short, this will require a bit of work from someone who specializes in this area. Good luck.

    
    

    
  
The temporary bugzilla ftp account referred to above has been deleted.

    
  
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE

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