Image blurring in Firefox 3

[VanillaMozilla]

ConceitArturo,
No one here has any power to change anything, so advocacy here is wasted. Requests for changes are formally handled with bug reports, and you are certainly free to do that.

You might discuss it with the people who designed the current system. You might have better success if you tell them exactly why you need to zoom pixel art. I myself have no idea. I don't know whether you can use other browsers, but these too may smooth the pixels in some way. Good luck.

[dickvl]

You can vote (do not comment in bug reports):
Bug 423756 – Request: Switch to turn on/off bilinear filtering when enlarging images

[VanillaMozilla]

So don't file a bug report, because there already is one.

[mariajohnson9]

Please check http://www.wayofthepixel.net/
http://pixeljoint.com/default.asp

Hope it will help to your requirement. Kindly give your feedback as well.

[schapel]

If you want browsers to display a big, aliased bitmap on your site, why not create a big, aliased bitmap and put it on your site? If you create a small bitmap and ask the browser to enlarge it, the results will vary depending on the browser, browser version, operating system, etc.

[VanillaMozilla]

Indeed, that's why I asked what they need this for. And if you just need to see a bitmap on a Web site or enlarge it, then just save the image and view it with an image processing program. What I don't see here is an explanation of what they are trying to do and why they need this.

[Bluefang]

Well, there is a simple reason as to why they do this. The basic unit in pixel art is a pixel. If you want to enlarge it, a pixel now takes up scale^2 more pixels. Because these are uncompressed formats, scaling an image server side also directly scales the storage space of the image. That's not economical in terms of storage or bandwidth.

[VanillaMozilla]

So does the image contain a directive to enlarge it on the Web page? Otherwise, it doesn't seem like there's much point. And if there is such a directive, there must be an appropriate standard, and that might be relevant here--right?

[Bluefang]

Uh... you can define the size of the displayed image in the image tag. It's been part of the HTML stander probably since the image tag has existed. It wouldn't be too hard to adjust those values using JS or by pre-setting them in the page generation script.

[VanillaMozilla]

Yeah, I thought so. Just wondering.

[schapel]

Well, there is a simple reason as to why they do this. The basic unit in pixel art is a pixel. If you want to enlarge it, a pixel now takes up scale^2 more pixels. Because these are uncompressed formats, scaling an image server side also directly scales the storage space of the image. That's not economical in terms of storage or bandwidth.

I would suggest that they use a compressed format such as GIF or PNG.

I'm still not clear as to exactly what the problem is. If you ask the browser to enlarge an image, you do not have control over how it is enlarged. Perhaps you could ask the W3C or WHATWG to add an attribute to the img element that would control how images are scaled. In the meantime, scale the images yourself and use a compressed format so the extra storage and bandwidth are minimized.

[dickvl]

It is about seeing pixels if you enlarge (zoom) an image. Those image are designed to be seen as pixels. Firefox 3 doesn't show the individual pixels anymore if you zoom, but the pixels are smoothed, so you can't see the original design (one color per very large image pixel instead of one color per screen pixel).

[VanillaMozilla]

Yes, dickvl, I think that's clear. But as schapel points out, unless there is a standard for the method of scaling (and apparently there is none), then they cannot rely on the images not being smoothed/anti-aliased. Then it becomes a matter of whether Mozilla (and other browser manufacturers) decide to provide an option for turning off anti-aliasing. I don't know anything about the standards, but it appears to me that schapel stated the situation exactly right. Hopefully this will clarify the situation for the pixel artists.

[schapel]

I think the discussion is confused because there seem to be two different issues being discussed as though they are one issue:

* Web developers want to specify that an image be scaled. This is done with the img tag. In this case, web developers cannot control how the image is scaled. This is not an issue with Firefox, but an issue that in HTML a web developer cannot specify how an image is scaled (for example, aliased or anti-aliased). The way to scale an image to ensure it is aliased or anti-aliased is to do it on the server side.

* Users want to specify that images on a web page be scaled. This is done with page zoom in Firefox 3. In this case, users may be able to control how an image is scaled, for example, by adding a preference as described in the bug report that dickvl links to above.

[henrikb]

I have a scientific use case where anti-aliasing is not wanted.

In biology there is a technology called microarrays a.k.a. gene chips. These consists of millions of features each probing a certain type of genetic activity. The signals are measured by scanning the microarray in a high-resolution scanner, the features are identified and averaged generating a gray-scale image of approx 3000x3000 pixels. Each pixel is important and corresponds to a unique genetic feature.

For quality assurance we look at each microarray image in order to see if there are spatial artifacts, scratches etc in the data. We start by looking at the full array and if we see bright spots we zoom in to see what is going. In this case it is very important that the pixels are no anti-aliased.

It is not a real option for us to rescale the 3000x3000 PNG images on the server or similar, because these PNG files are already large (5-10MB), we want to be able to do this not only locally but over the web, and we have hundreds to thousands of images. You'll find a small demo via http://braju.com/fwd/firefox3antialias.html illustrating how it works. Firefox 2 was great for this, but the anti-aliasing in Firefox 3 makes the zooming much less useful.

Having a Firefox config option specifying how rescaling is done would be great. Then the old approach/algorithm (which can add that many bytes) can be made an option. Then, if the rescaling algorithm eventually becomes part of the HTML/CSS standard, then there can be an option to have HTML/CSS set it as well.

Henrik Bengtsson
UC Berkeley