Comments on: Which browser scales images the best?

By: Kelson

Kelson — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:39:27 +0000

Yeah developers should use thumbnails instead… Save us the CPU usage, bandwidth, and can use an even better resize algorithm.

Plus making your own thumbnails allows you to do selective cropping. Some images aren’t clear when you shrink them, whether you do it in Photoshop or let the browser handle it. In those case, it often helps to pick a smaller section of the image, crop it, then create the thumbnail.

By: ResearchWizard

ResearchWizard — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 06:42:29 +0000

That’s a great hint, diz (although I’ll not turn it off as long as my computer is still fast enough)

Besides that I discovered that page-zoom in IE7 is different: background-images are not zoomed (at least not always), while Opera does. IE7-zoom is breaking the look and feel of my website

By: vect

vect — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 04:45:04 +0000

Great find diz. Works great

Yeah developers should use thumbnails instead… Save us the CPU usage, bandwidth, and can use an even better resize algorithm.

By: Kc4

Kc4 — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:21:28 +0000

Sorry about the delay in a response (Internet has been acting up)

I KNOW that Opera is better than FF at this (and almost everything else I try). I hate it when I use my brothers comps (they refuse to use any non open-source browser) cause FF feels so wrong.

The scaling down of images is ****
IT AUTOMATICALLY ADDS A BORDER TO LINKS IMAGES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When I DOUBLE CLICK ON A URL I WANT IT TO SELECT THE WHOLE URL NOT JUST A SECTION!!!!!!!!!

Thus ends my rant

By: diz

diz — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:40:05 +0000

Opera uses better looking but more CPU intensive scaling algorithm. That’s all.

One can turn it off here
opera:config#Multimedia|InterpolateImages
to make it faster (and uglier). To all needs

By: Bungie

Bungie — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:42:17 +0000

But I know Firefox 3 is catching up fast.

How do you know? Wow, Acid2 and better image rendering… Yeah, that sure means that Firefox is catching up fast since Opera is clearly not getting any improvements!

By: Beatrice

Beatrice — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:06:02 +0000

I’ve actually discovered for a long time that Opera renders images better than other major browsers. (I am not sure about Safari)

But I know Firefox 3 is catching up fast. Because I’ve heard that the major change from Firefox 2 and 3 is the rendering engine, especially on imaging.

It seems that the new Gecko engine is very promising, it even passes the Acid test.

By: Bungie

Bungie — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:50:06 +0000

This proves once more that Firefox 3 rendering engine is coming closer to the one we have inside Opera.

Uhhh… How do you figure? You think Opera will go without improvements? Interesting theory…

Anyway, something that we know won’t change in Firefox/Gecko is that it’s bigger and slower than Opera.

By: vect

vect — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:46:16 +0000

Well kyle has got the right idea. Seems to me to be a performance trade-off. Downscaled images do look bad in ie7 and ff2, but opera lags the most when scrolling kyle’s page - I’m sure there’s some relation.. (haven’t tried ff3 since i don’t have it installed)

random note: ie7 does nicer scaling when using page zoom. Maybe keep the zoom at 99% haha

By: DD32

DD32 — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:14:08 +0000

The screenshot images are very clear and clean, but cause the window to scrolls lowly in Opera,

I’ve noticed that on a few sites now.. and never realised it was due to people setting image sizes via HTML.

You might want to create thumbnails for your screenshots, 750KB is too much for a single webpage for most people(esp. those on dialup).. Could cut it down to 17KB(instead of 130KB+) per image if you used thumbnails.. Do you -need- to use the full screenshot res there?

By: Frenzie

Frenzie — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:48:52 +0000

Well, I could have made that post three years ago. I thought everyone knew. The only difference is that Cairo is finally catching up now…

By: ResearchWizard

ResearchWizard — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:56:01 +0000

Kyle, I can confirm your experiences: beautiful zoomed down screenshots while scrolling is slow in Opera and pixel-images in Firefox2 and IE7. I discovered the page zoom of IE7 produces a similar effect - better images and worse scrolling. wupperbayer: IE7 (IMHO well known) can scale whole websites in a Opera-like way - a feature supported since Opera2 in 1996. Fit-to-width is still missing.

By: David Naylor

David Naylor — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:30:21 +0000

Yeah, in Firefox 3 it both renders and scrolls nicely… Shame it’s still ~10 months off…

By: GeekK

GeekK — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:18:06 +0000

A user in this dutch tech forum noticed differences in how FF/IE (’and any other viewer’) and Opera rendered a particular JPG @ 300%: link. The difference is indeed noticeable. However, I’m not tech-savy enough to judge what this shows about IE/FF vs Opera. What is considered a fair rendering. I can imagine that a renderer can wipe out glitches that are nevertheless in the picture itself. (Correct me if I talk nonsense ).

By: Bo

Bo — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:07:16 +0000

>And btw. it’s interesting how many of the
>commenters already use Opera “9.12″ — me too

Well, it’s the spyware-edition, so we all want to support Opera, aren’t we?

I just compared to the firefox-scaling would never have thought, that there’s a notable difference, but there clearly is.