Regarding FireFox3 zoom filter

[Elrinth]

Hi!

I already posted at support.mozilla.com in this thread:
http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_fo ... &forumId=1
but it seems it's being totally ignored, so I'm hoping to find better results here.

Anyways, FireFox 3 has a zoom filter on scaled images which is annoying for us pixel artists. In both IE7 and FF2 there was no filter, but in FF3 there is this new annoying filter which I was hoping I could turn off.

If you click an image in any of the threads on this page it sets the width and height 2x:
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation ... pic=6466.0

As you can see ff3 makes the images all blurry.. and that's not what I'm interested in seeing when I click. I want to be able to disable this in FF3 so I can see it none interpolated.

I hope someone else agreeds with me.

[Bluefang]

That's because Firefox 3 (on windows) uses bilinear filtering, which will cause pixelated images to look smoother. This is very good for just about everything except pixel art.

see this bug
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423756

This should be a relatively simple thing to do, but it will not make it Fire 3.0 final. If this does ever happen, it could possibly in one of the support releases or more likely in 3.1/3.5.

Feel free to confirm that bug (or ask someone with a Bugzilla account to do so).

[Elrinth]

thank you for the reply...

[kliu0x52]

Confirmed and moved to Core. IMHO, instead of an option to disable/enable it, I think that smoothing should always be on except when the scaling factor is an integer (i.e., new%old==0).

[Stifu]

IMHO, instead of an option to disable/enable it, I think that smoothing should always be on except when the scaling factor is an integer (i.e., new%old==0).

But that'd mean that when zooming on a site at 200%, there'd be no filtering on images.
Zooming and image resizing are fully tied.

[kliu0x52]

IMHO, instead of an option to disable/enable it, I think that smoothing should always be on except when the scaling factor is an integer (i.e., new%old==0).

But that'd mean that when zooming on a site at 200%, there'd be no filtering on images.
Zooming and image resizing are fully tied.

I don't think that's a bad thing. The problems with the ugliness with the old image zooming are when the scaling is non-integer. I'm not sure that smoothing an image that is integer-scaled is a good thing...

[Stifu]

I'm not sure that smoothing an image that is integer-scaled is a good thing...

It depends on the images, of course (like, for pictures, it'd be good). But I'd say it's a good thing in general.
Besides, as you zoom in, it'd be weird that on some levels, images are filtered, and on some others, they aren't.

[Bluefang]

I don't think it's a bad thing either.

A preference sounds like a much better solution to me. The preference could also be a milti-state one, which would allow images to be filtered never, non-integer only, or always. Should someone what that kind of behavior.

[13xforever]

IMHO, the best thing ever is to hint in tag whether to filter scaled image or not. (Maybe something like Mozilla extensions for CSS or similar).

[kliu0x52]

IMHO, the best thing ever is to hint in tag whether to filter scaled image or not. (Maybe something like Mozilla extensions for CSS or similar).

That makes sense, as the presentation is something that should be up to the author.

[Bluefang]

Yeah, but AFAIK there is no (X)HTML or CSS tag that would cover that. And it is generally a bad idea to invent this kind of thing (i.e. see IE and sta state of the internet).

It's also important to note that this functionality needs to be present for images that didn't specify that kind of information (which would be the vast majority), so, for the time being, leaving control in the hand of the user is the best solution.

[Carnivac]

Hi, I've just installed Firefox 3.0 and while some things seem pretty good (page displaying/switching seems especially fast) I just can't stand the blurry crap mentioned here either. Every image I zoom in gets so blurry it's an eyesore. I don't like it even on photographs as it doesn't really seem to make them any clearer or anything so why bother smoothing it all. And again like the original topic starter I make and view a lot of pixel art and it bugs me now that I can't zoom into any pixel art image and view it in detail within Firefox 3. The main reason I use FF is the Image Zoom extension as I like the choice of being able to scale any image at all on a webpage but now I just find it totally unusable.

Sorry if this post comes across as a lil rude or anything. Been a supporter of Firefox for last few years but this is the first thing that's really pissed me off about it. Is there possibly anyway to disable it or at least that suggestion of using a tag to force your own website to not blur images (some of the images on my site are scaled at x2 by default in the code for a pixelly look and easier viewing while still able to use the original x1 size elsewhere but now the images look awful due to the blurring). I really like the speed improvements brought by FF3 but I'm going to have to downgrade back to FF2 if this can't be fixed. Problem with that though is the issue will still be present by everyone else using FF3 wanting to zoom into images and I'm not sure how I'm gonna fix my own site because it seems most of my visitors use FF and will likely have updated to 3.0.

[Stifu]

You may not have seen it yourself, but it looked much worse in the vast majority of the cases before bilinear filtering got implemented...

[Carnivac]

Nothing's as bad as it is now. Every image that gets scaled makes me feel like I need glasses to correct the focus. I want an option to have the old way back as soon as possible.

[lakrids]

I agree that bilinear filtering is better than no filtering at all. I just hope we get an optional choice for lanczos filtering instead in the future, it would solve the blurry problem.