975885 - Flash objects do not scale correctly on high DPI screens (Windows 8, FF 27)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 820831

(External Software Affecting Firefox Graveyard :: Flash (Adobe), defect)

Description

[Brett Dalton]

Attachment: EchoPlayer - Firefox bad flash scaling.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140212131424

Steps to reproduce:

Environment  
Windows 8.1 64 Bit 
FF 27.0.1
Dell "New" XPS 15 with 3200x1800 screen resolution.  Font scaling set to larger than normal.

Load flash Application, in this case EchoSystem player.  same problem occurs with Youtube


Actual results:

flash objects are not scaled, text is unreadable, buttons too small to use.  This ONLY occurs in firefox, IE and Chrome work as expected.

Attached is a screen shot of FF and IE on the same screen and application.


Expected results:

Flash objects as part of the interface should have been scaled appropriately along with the rest of the FF interface.

Comment 1

[Brett Dalton]

Attachment: EchoPlayer IE 11 - correct Flash scaling.jpg

Comment 2

[Greg Edwards]

Looks like a dupe of Bug 820831 which is entirely Adobe's fault. IE was also broken at the time I reported it but it looks like MS fixed it at some point after they took over providing patches for IE's Flash plugin themselves.

See: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3536168

Chrome would probably be affected if they had high DPI support at all.

Comment 3

[tomass123]

chrome is upscaling. So flash works. Only FF is unusable when flash is involved. I don't need to mention how many technical links points to YT today.

Comment 4

[Valentin Neacsu]

I can confirm the reported bug. All works ok on IE11 on Windows 8.1 x64.

Comment 5

[Richard]

I can confirm this. Flash objects do not scale properly on high-dpi screens. The flash objects are rendered at 100% and not the DPI percentage that is required. Internet Explorer and Chrome renders the flash on high DPI-screens properly.

Comment 6

[sander.dewit]

I can confirm this too with Firefox 32.0.2.

Comment 7

[Greg Edwards]

I can confirm that the problem is fixed on both IE and Chrome, but not Firefox. It's getting pretty bad that Adobe is now providing Firefox a subpar experience compared to the other browsers.

Comment 8

[noiwex1911]

I have this too and it's very annoying, should I just switch to Chrome?

Comment 9

[Ryan Rubley]

I see this problem on Firefox 34 still. There are lots of big-name sites that are borderline unusable on Firefox, but work just fine on Chrome 39 and IE 11 on the same computer. At 200% scaling on a 2880x1620 Windows 8 laptop, the controls on YouTube are so tiny you almost can't click on them, and you certainly can't rely on the touch-screen for that.  Also, all the videos on CNN's website take up the top-left quarter of the area they are supposed to, but they play just fine on Chrome and IE.

It seems like Chrome and IE manage to scale Flash objects correctly, so Firefox should be able to do something similar.

Comment 10

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Two things:
* The plugins IE and Chrome use are very different (ActiveX and Pepper based).
* The scaling issues are pretty different between sites (e.g. Youtube scales the video right, CNN doesn't). Thus this seems to be an issue with Flash or with the specific applets scaling approach.

Comment 12

[Ryan Rubley]

Is there any way Firefox or a plugin can force the Stage Scaling parameter to 'On'? http://ark42.com/flashscale/

Neither Mozilla nor Adobe seem particularly concerned about this bug, which is strange because anybody with a HiDPI screen would immediately see this as a top priority blocking bug that would surely get fixed before the next major release of either product...

Comment 13

[simpsons-gila]

I can also confirm this. Using it on a 15,6" dipslay with 4K resolution it's unusable. Youtube's HTML5 does a good job, but Flash is terrible. Unusable.

Comment 14

[matthias.hoeller]

I can also confirm this bug is still not fixed with Firefox 43.0.2 and both the latest Adobe Flash Firefox Plugin official release (20.0.0.235) and the latest Adobe Flash Firefox beta (20.0.0.255).

I agree with Ryan that it is hard to grasp how this bug can remain unadressed for so long because as he already wrote, for anyone using a 4K display, this is an utter showstopper. A large percentage of websites still use flash technology, and all of them are unusable on a 4K display with Firefox.

Comment 15

[tom.folk]

Windows 10 Pro - Firefox 43.0.2 - not fixed

Very annoying how the vast majority of applications do not offer full high DPI support yet, and if they do offer it, it's only partial

Comment 16

[simpsons-gila]

Even on 43.0.3 it's not fixed. I still don't know if it's a Flash or a Firefox issue. It works perfectly fine on INternet Explorer and Chrome, which means that Adobe seems to have fixed the high dpi issue not scaling for other browser... Come on Thsi mst be easy to fix, just a bug somewhere. Bought this Asus Zenbook 501 4K display and it's ridiculous.

Windows 8.1
Thanks

Comment 17

[Greg Edwards]

Read up. The problem is 100% on Adobe's side.

Comment 19

[Ryan Rubley]

This bug is on Adobe's side technically, but there is still lots Firefox *could* do to make things look better, but chooses not to. See bug 820831 also. Firefox *could* scale up Flash content, which might make it look less crisp than the ideal solution of Adobe implementing HiDPI support properly in NPAPI flash. I think this is what Firefox should have done a long time ago, but the Firefox developers seem hesitant to do that because of cases where Stage Scaling is On in the Flash file. If Firefox scaled things up then, it would not change the size of buttons and text (they'd already be the correct size), it would just make things less crisp looking. Frankly, from a usability standpoint on a 192dpi laptop screen, the blurrier-but-always-correct-size approach should be the obvious choice.
Firefox+Flash will probably remain completely unusable on all modern laptops until Flash completely goes away.

Comment 20

[jiangzhenjerry]

(In reply to Ryan Rubley from comment #19)
> This bug is on Adobe's side technically, but there is still lots Firefox
> *could* do to make things look better, but chooses not to. See bug 820831
> also. Firefox *could* scale up Flash content, which might make it look less
> crisp than the ideal solution of Adobe implementing HiDPI support properly
> in NPAPI flash. I think this is what Firefox should have done a long time
> ago, but the Firefox developers seem hesitant to do that because of cases
> where Stage Scaling is On in the Flash file. If Firefox scaled things up
> then, it would not change the size of buttons and text (they'd already be
> the correct size), it would just make things less crisp looking. Frankly,
> from a usability standpoint on a 192dpi laptop screen, the
> blurrier-but-always-correct-size approach should be the obvious choice.
> Firefox+Flash will probably remain completely unusable on all modern laptops
> until Flash completely goes away.

I want to second on that. That it's someone else's fault doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea to keep eyes shut. Let's just face the fact: almost all other browsers (as "ancient" as IE, or as "modern" as Chrome and Microsoft Edge) support proper Flash scaling. Flash won't go away immediately, which means some high-end PC users would have to turn away from Firefox.

Comment 21

[simpsons-gila]

"Support for Browser Zoom Factor in Firefox

We’ve extended the support for Browser Zoom Feature that proposes scaling of Flash content in the web browser in response to web page zoom factor change. This feature is already available for the ActiveX and PPAPI plugin (link).

It will be available from Flash Player version 21 on wards and is currently available on Firefox Nightly 45.0a1, the official Firefox version supporting the feature has yet to be announced."

From Adobe Flash website, hopefully we will get this soon for a official Firefox release.

Comment 23

[Benjamin Smedberg]

We are working with Adobe on this in bug 820831. But I'll encourage everyone here not to comment-spam that bug, because it makes the engineering work harder.