Bad image quality

[Michael Terry]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.5

I'm running Karmic, and a "little while ago" I noticed that images were being rendered poorly. For example, Google's homepage logo shows noticeable artifacts. It's not quite pixelation. Maybe odd aliasing? This occurs for gifs, pngs, and jpgs.

When I right click on the image and choose 'View Image', Firefox can display it correctly.

I'm attaching screenshots of the Google logo drawn on the page (poorly) and with View Image (well).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Aug 24 13:33:04 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: firefox-3.5 3.5.2+nobinonly-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-6.26-generic
SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-6-generic i686

[NoBugs! (luke32j)]

This is supposed to fix it: https://launchpad.net/~firefox-smooth-scaling
However, the latest update to Firefox seems to have broken this fix.

[Jonas Diaz (jonasdiaz)]

I have the same problem, if you need more information, just let me know...

[Lachezar Dobrev (lachezar)]

Guys... Did you by any chance have ZOOM turned on?
Press CTRL-0 to revert to no zoom. Images tend to render with artefacts when zoomed, and I see, that the logo posted as bad.png is a bit larger than the one on the Google home page.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

That's almost certainly it. I can't confirm if I had it on at the time of the report, but I can imagine I did. I sometimes use the ctrl++ or ctrl+- bindings to zoom in and out. I was used to it just affecting text (and prefer if it still did), but that's probably what this was. So not a bug per se, but a (to me) upstream misfeature. Closing.