848018 - Background of transparent images is light gray with dithering (instead of clean white)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Patrick Storz]

Attachment: example.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20130215130331

Steps to reproduce:

Open an image with transparent background (e.g. http://www.mozilla.org/img/covehead/template/title.png).


Actual results:

The background of the image isn't clean white (as it was in previous versions of FF) but some very light gray with some very ugly noise.

See the screenshot for details. It shows a clean white are area I edited in with GIMP to visualize that the background of the image isn't white at all and noisy. Furthermore I included a clean gray with the mean color value of the site background to show that it is noisy, too (that is bug 789820)


Expected results:

The background should definitely be monochromatic (or checkerboard like discussed elsewhere) and not ugly and noisy like it is now.

Comment 1

[Patrick Storz]

Wow... so this was actually intended in the first place? Who came up with this idea? Is this some kind of "retro" stuff - adding some noise here and there?

This should definitely be reconsidered...

Comment 2

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Hi Eduard,

Thank you for your feedback. As you have noted, this change was intended and there aren't any plans to change this.

The https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/custom-image-backgrounds/ add-on will allow you to change the background of these pages, and the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/transparent-standalone-imag/ add-on will remove the background from the image itself.

Comment 3

[Patrick Storz]

Is there any place where I can read back who had this silly idea and what the motives for such a change where? I just can't imagine how this could be intended.

At least the background should be white or really gray (that is some darker gray). Not just very light gray as it is now (that only looks unclean but doesn't differ from real white in the image).

Comment 4

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

You can read more in bug 793366 comment #0.

I understand that you aren't happy with this change, but it is hard to please everyone. The add-ons that I mentioned above will allow you to change the look of these pages so not to cause any issues for you. Please leave the status of this bug unchanged.

Comment 5

[Patrick Storz]

Then you should consider answering my questions instead of overhasty closing the bug over and over again.

So:
- Why was chosen a gray so light that it looks like dirty white?
- Who is happy with this change at all?

If you present me with valid arguments I'll alway accept it if a bug is closed. But not an answer that basically says "we don't care at all"!

Comment 6

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

(In reply to Eduard Braun from comment #5)
> - Why was chosen a gray so light that it looks like dirty white?

It is nice to have the texture extend from the page background into the image background. Some images have a white background with transparent parts around them. The subtle noise allows the clean-white parts to stand out against the noisy-white background.

Solid white and solid black are not natural colors. If you read a printout on white paper, the paper has its own noise that is part of the paper's texture. The noise on the white background is similar in this respect.

> - Who is happy with this change at all?

I will pass on this leading question.

Comment 7

[Patrick Storz]

Well, at least that sounds like a valid reason now.

However I'm still pretty sure random noise is the most unfavorable way to solve this. It will look much better (and not as if it was unintentional) when we used something like a checkered background like proposed in bug 754539. It has a reason this is used in all image editors I now.

In the meantime I solved it for me with an entry in userContent.css. I'll attach it in case anybody else experiences this bug.

Comment 8

[Patrick Storz]

Attachment: Workaround for this bug using custom CSS in userContent.css