Bug 41233 - REGRESSION: r61173-r61351 - Aliasing of scaled images on resize
Summary: REGRESSION: r61173-r61351 - Aliasing of scaled images on resize
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: WebKit
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Images (show other bugs)
Version: 528+ (Nightly build)
Hardware: Mac OS X 10.5
: P2 Normal
Assignee: Nobody
URL: http://development.rhubarbproductions...
Keywords: Regression
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2010-06-25 16:22 PDT by Kevin M. Dean
Modified: 2010-06-27 14:45 PDT (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Kevin M. Dean 2010-06-25 16:22:29 PDT
Spin-off of Bug 40904

Resize your browser window to small and load the above link. Aliasing of image occurs when resizing the window which didn't occur before.

I've been told that this is now expected behavior - "An image that is rapidly resizing will use a lower quality interpolation setting until it finishes resizing, at which point it will use a higher quality interpolation.  Performing high-quality interpolation on a resizing image hurts performance."

A couple of points of contention with that statement.

1. This doesn't just happen with rapidly resizing, it's happening with all resizing even if I resize slowly.

2. Low quality until it finishes resizing seems to mean when I release the mouse button, because it doesn't clean up until after the mouse is released, not when the resizing has settled.

3. Performance wasn't hurt before on my PPC Mac a few nightlies back, so why sacrifice smoothness and elegance for everyone to cater to the lowest common denominator.

Shouldn't the low-quality interpolation only kick in when it's on a low performance device and not for everyone even if they're on a well performing computer? Could it at least be tiered to detect when it's below a certain speed in image updates to detect when it should switch to low quality or something like that. There's got to be a better way than just turning it off.

Firefox doesn't do it, and Safari didn't used to do it. It just seems a step back in quality. It also affects javascript-based resizing where it didn't before.

Go to http://shadowbox-js.com/ and scroll down and click on the Tiger image and the resize your browser to smaller than the tiger picture. Before it was a beautiful thing, scaling smoothly and cleanly as you resized the window. Now it's just a chunky uglier version of itself, when performance-wise there was no problem before. Just a step back in quality in my opinion. It just seems as we're moving further into an era where javascript and css manipulations of graphics are becoming more prevalent to throw out quality that was already in place and feature-matched or exceeded the quality of other browsers.

Thoughts?