How Do I Look To You?

Following up on an article I recently read regarding the rendering of images, I decided to paste together a montage of what our avatars look like under the different browsers we all use to bend the Internets to our will. Given the results of the article and my previous firsthand experience with all these browsers, I expected Internet Explorer to mangle our avatars, and Opera to benefit from its bicubic bedrock beyond all bound. Behold, the lenses of four different engines!

From left to right, the browser used was:

• Internet Explorer 7


• Firefox 2


• Firefox 3


• Opera 9

NOTE: I didn’t include a link to Firefox 3 because it won’t be released until November. The version I tested with is an early developer release, and is so unstable that its codename is “Minefield.” But the new graphics engine has already been implemented, so it’s a fair test.

I also didn’t test the way everyone’s avatars would look under “new Blogger” blogs, or how they would look if they were enlarged (though I hear Firefox is great at making images larger, with some kind of mystical bilinear filter from the future).

Here’s a perfect example of the depravity I’ve been talking about. Anyone looking at Jon’s avatar in Internet Explorer or the current Firefox would assume he was some kind of gelatinous blob, instead of the macho warrior the dainty Opera browser depicts.

Like Jon, you can barely make out Flatlander’s stylized face amid the pixelation in browsers one and two. Where’s the zip? The pizazz? He even looks kind of angry to be in those browsers, wouldn’t you say?

Magnifique! The lovely Ms. Jin, like her baked goods, is a masterpiece in all browsers. I can see a distinct crispness in the Opera partition (which will make her smile as she reads this), though the quality of image scaling for photos seems to be equal across all browsers.

The Professor looks a little off in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. A little... scrunched. Some browsers’ scaling algorithms must be more equal than others.

Is it just me, or does Firefox 2 Koma seem a little surprised?

Firefox 3 seems uniquely suited to handling cartoons, with ease and integrity. For shame, Opera, for shame.

You can clearly see, if you look hard enough, the jagged edges on Tak’s helmet in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. And the words at the bottom of his avatar look a little less blurred in Firefox 3 and Opera, which is consistent with the article’s testing of tiny, typed text’s tidiness.

The Alpha and the Omega: all the yellow buttons are different cross-browser, the mouth looks better in Firefox 3 and Opera 9, and the fingers were poorly drawn to begin with. Yet, the orange bulb on the tip of the hat looks much less jagged in Firefox 3. I can’t explain that, other than to say that the Mozilla corporation is starting to design their graphics engines to accommodate me, personally.

By the way, if anyone wants a copy of their avatar from Opera/Firefox 3 to use, comment and I’ll send you a bitmap.