Image scaling causes poor quality in firefox internet explorer but not chrome

Question

See http   jsfiddle net aJ333 1  in Chrome and then in either Firefox or Internet Explorer  The image is originally 120px  and I m scaling down to 28px  but it looks bad pretty much no matter what you scale it down to   The image is a PNG and it has an alpha channel  transparency    Here s the relevant code   HTML    lt a href  http   tinypic com ref 2z5jbtg  target   blank  gt       lt img src  http   i44 tinypic com 2z5jbtg png  border  0  alt  Image and video hosting by TinyPic  gt   lt  a gt     CSS   a       width  28px      height  28px      display  block     img       max-width  100       max-height  100       image-rendering  -moz-crisp-edges      -ms-interpolation-mode  bicubic      The image-rendering and -ms-interpolation-mode lines of CSS didn t seem to do anything  but I found them online while doing some research on the problem

User · Answer

Seems Chrome downscaling is best but the real question is why use such a massive image on the web if you use show is so massively scaled down? Downloadtimes as seen on the test page above are terrible. Especially for responsive websites a certain amount of scaling makes sense, actually more a scale up than scale down though. But never in such a (sorry pun) scale.

Seems this is more a theoretical problem which Chrome seems to deal with nicely but actually should not happen and actually should not be used in practice IMHO.

User · Answer

You should try to maintain a proper aspect ratio between the sizes you re scaling from and to  For example  if your target size is 28px  then your source size should be a power of that  such as 56  28 x 2  or 112  28 x 4   This ensures you can scale by 50  or 25  rather than the 0 233333  you re currently using

User · Answer

This is possible  At least now that css transforms have good support   You need to use a CSS transform to scale the image - the trick is not just to use a scale    but also to apply a very small rotation  This triggers IE to use a smoother interpolation of the image   img          double desired size        width  56px       height  56px          margins to reduce layout size to match the transformed size         margin  -14px -14px -14px -14px           transform to scale with smooth interpolation         transform  scale 0 5  rotate 0 1deg

User · Answer

Late answer but this works      applies to GIF and PNG images  avoids blurry edges    img src    gif    img src    png         image-rendering  -moz-crisp-edges             Firefox        image-rendering    -o-crisp-edges             Opera        image-rendering  -webkit-optimize-contrast    Webkit  non-standard naming         image-rendering  crisp-edges      -ms-interpolation-mode  nearest-neighbor      IE  non-standard property         https   developer mozilla org en docs Web CSS image-rendering  Here is another link as well which talks about browser support   https   css-tricks com almanac properties i image-rendering

User · Answer

I ve seen the same thing in firefox  css transform scaled transparent png s looking very rough   I noticed that when they previously had a background color set the quality was much better  so I tried setting an RGBA background with as low an opacity value as possible   background rgba 255 255 255 0 001     This worked for me  give it a try

User · Answer

Remember that sizes on the web are increasing dramatically  3 years ago  I did an overhaul to bring our 500 px wide site layout to 1000  Now  where many sites are doing the jump to 1200  we jumped past that and went to a 2560 max optimized for 1600 wide  or 80  depending on the content level  main content area with responsiveness to allow the exact same ratios and look and feel on a laptop  1366x768  and on mobile  1280x720 or smaller    Dynamic resizing is an integral part of this and will only become more-so as responsiveness becomes more and more important in 2013   My smartphone has no trouble dealing with the content with 25 items on a page being resized - neither the computation for resizing nor the bandwidth  3 seconds loads the page from fresh  Looks great on our 6 year old presentation laptop  1366x768  and on the projector  800x600     Only on Mozilla Firefox does it look genuinely atrocious  It even looks just fine on IE8  never used updated since I installed it 2 5 years ago

User · Answer

IE Scaling Depends on Amount of Downsize  Some people said that an even fraction downsize avoids the problem  I disagree   In IE11 I find that reducing an image by 50   e g  300px to 150px  yields a jagged resize  like it s using nearest-neighbor    A resize to  99  or 73   e g  300px to 276px  yields a smoother image  bilinear or bicubic etc   In response I ve been using images that are just retina-ish  maybe 25  bigger than would be used on a traditional 1 1 pixel mapping screen  so that IE only resizes a bit and doesn t trigger the ugliness

User · Answer

One way to  normalize  the appearance in the different browsers is using your  server-side  to resize the image  An example using a C  controller   public ActionResult ResizeImage string imageUrl  int width        WebImage wImage   new WebImage imageUrl       wImage   WebImageExtension Resize wImage  width       return File wImage GetBytes     image png        where WebImage is a class in System Web Helpers   WebImageExtension is defined below   using System IO  using System Web Helpers  using System Drawing  using System Drawing Imaging  using System Drawing Drawing2D  using System Collections Generic   public static class WebImageExtension       private static readonly IDictionary lt string  ImageFormat gt  TransparencyFormats           new Dictionary lt string  ImageFormat gt  StringComparer OrdinalIgnoreCase       png   ImageFormat Png       gif   ImageFormat Gif           public static WebImage Resize this WebImage image  int width                double aspectRatio    double image Width   image Height          var height   Convert ToInt32 width   aspectRatio            ImageFormat format           if   TransparencyFormats TryGetValue image ImageFormat ToLower    out format                         return image Resize width  height                      using  Image resizedImage   new Bitmap width  height                         using  var source   new Bitmap new MemoryStream image GetBytes                                    using  Graphics g   Graphics FromImage resizedImage                                         g SmoothingMode   System Drawing Drawing2D SmoothingMode AntiAlias                      g InterpolationMode   System Drawing Drawing2D InterpolationMode HighQualityBicubic                      g DrawImage source  0  0  width  height                                                using  var ms   new MemoryStream                                  resizedImage Save ms  format                   return new WebImage ms ToArray                                       note the option InterpolationMode HighQualityBicubic  This is the method used by Chrome   Now you need publish in a web page  Lets going use razor    lt img src   Url Action  ResizeImage    Controller   new   urlImage     lt url image gt    width   35       gt    And this worked very fine to me   Ideally will be better to save the image beforehand in diferent widths  using this resize algorithm  to avoid the controller process in every image load    Sorry for my poor english  I m brazilian

User · Answer

Your problem is that you are relying on the browser to resize your images  Browsers have notoriously poor image scaling algorithms  which will cause the ugly pixelization   You should resize your images in a graphics program first before you use them on the webpage   Also  you have a spelling mistake  it should say moz-crisp-edges  however  that won t help you in your case  because that resizing algorithm won t give you a high quality resize  https   developer mozilla org En CSS Image-rendering

User · Answer

It seems that you are right  No option scales the image better  http   www maxrev de html image-scaling html  I ve tested FF14  IE9  OP12 and GC21  Only GC has a better scaling that can be deactivated through image-rendering  -webkit-optimize-contrast  All other browsers have no poor scaling   Screenshot of the different output  http   www maxrev de files 2012 08 screenshot interpolation jquery animate png  Update 2017  Meanwhile some more browsers support smooth scaling    ME38  Microsoft Edge  has good scaling  It can t be disabled and it works for JPEG and PNG  but not for GIF  FF51  Regarding  karthik  s comment since FF21  has good scaling that can be disabled through the following settings   image-rendering  optimizeQuality image-rendering  optimizeSpeed image-rendering  -moz-crisp-edges   Note  Regarding MDN the optimizeQuality setting is a synonym for auto  but auto does not disable smooth scaling       The values optimizeQuality and optimizeSpeed present in early draft    and coming from its SVG counterpart  are defined as synonyms for the   auto value   OP43 behaves like GC  not suprising as it is based on Chromium since 2013  and its still this option that disables smooth scaling   image-rendering  -webkit-optimize-contrast    No support in IE9-IE11  The -ms-interpolation-mode setting worked only in IE6-IE8  but was removed in IE9   P S  Smooth scaling is done by default  This means no image-rendering option is needed

[html] Image scaling causes poor quality in firefox/internet explorer but not chrome

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