Comments on: Web Browsers War – Image Rendering

By: Austin

Austin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:07:34 +0000

I totally agree with Vaughn. I save a lot of bandwith on my site by scaling images. It is important that they are scaled using nearest-neighbour algorithm and not bi-cubic as that creates a unwanted blurry effect.

I’m glad Microsoft and Mozilla fixed this issue. Still waiting for others though.

By: Vaughn

Vaughn — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:45:53 +0000

Image scaling is VERY important – especially for the web developer to be able to control it, it’s not splitting hairs at all. For example, say I had a pixel art 16×16 icon, that I wanted to blow up to 256×256, with bi-linear interpolation it will be insanely blurry, while in older days when most browsers used bi-cubic by default this was never a problem. That 16×16 (1kb) image would be nice a crisp even at 1024×1024 – now we are forced to increase file sizes for users. Fortunately Mozilla and Microsoft realized what they did and now offer a solution:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/CSS/Image-rendering

Hopefully Opera/Apple/Google catches on.

By: Shawn

Shawn — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:13:43 +0000

Firefox ’should’ now fare much better with the release of 3.6

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:54:17 +0000

I’ve just discovered that the Chrome browser causes severe banding when it displays jpegs with black and white gradients. I checked the same images in Firefox and IE and they both display the photos normally.
As someone selling my black and white photographs on the web, this is a big problem. I can see it in any b&w image with a smooth blend of tone. Chrome seems to do well with color images, but shows a posterized version of the image in BW.

By: Henrik

Henrik — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:51:34 +0000

Scaling is very important in my opinion! Surfing on my 50″ 1080p TV sitting 3,5 meters from it is a pleasure in Firefox since it scales everything, including pictures, without distorting the page horribly. Chrome does not, it’s only advantage is it’s speed.

By: NBurman

NBurman — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:03:49 +0000

I don’t think the point is that anyone is going to view sites at 200%, just like nobody drives a car with their head under the hood, but you still might have to look under their before you buy.
I think this is a fascinating test that can be taken for what it’s worth.
And I’m sure that everyone who commented knows that there are more reasons than rendering for choosing a browser.
Thanks for the hard work!

By: Robert K

Robert K — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:24:56 +0000

Is this useful to anyone but browser teams responsible for writing the image scaling code? For web developers/designers, this behavior is what it is for each browser – there’s no way to affect it other than to render your own scaled versions of images.

The only time it really makes sense to rely on browser scaling is if you want to render the same graphic at different sizes without having to download a different image for each size. In that case you typically use an image at the largest resolution needed and scale *down* so, really, the most important test is the 9% star test. (I literally cannot remember the last time I intentionally relied on a browser to scale an image up. Seriously. The results are so uniformly shoddy that it’s just never a good idea.)

One last point: You’re testing a b&w vector graphic here, which is a bit of an edge case in the real-world. Most graphics will be some sort of photo or graphic where the edges are much less distinct. For those, the browser differences will be much harder to detect, especially when scaling down.

I appreciate how this test might encourage browser developers to improve the scaling algorithms being used but, frankly, you’re really splitting hairs here. The algorithms are all good enough that I would much rather the teams spend their time on something more important. Like support for CSS3 or SVG.

My $0.02.

By: Shawn Smith

Shawn Smith — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:58:39 +0000

How does the latest webkit nightly build do? It should perform closer to the chrome results…

By: HeyNow

HeyNow — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:10:29 +0000

IE, for me, is the slowest browser of them all. Running an older HP w/ an Athlon 3200+ 2.19 Ghz w/ 1GB ram

By: Andy Gongea

Andy Gongea — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:13:45 +0000

Yes Joe, in the upcoming tests we will gather all major benchmark tests and we will show you the results.