All Bitmap formats will blur when zoomed under current OSX browsers. I'm pretty sure this also applies to JPG. It's a browser based interpolation. To get around it, we may need a server side solution in the future.
It is disappointing that you can't post art or create a website and have users see what you had intended to show them, all because of narrow minded software engineers that believe having an interpolation blur should be the default. Even if we argue that we must sometimes roll with the changes, the aftermath shows us that we do not have a native solution for rendering nearest-neighbor (non blur). Populist arguments often work when dealing with widely used software, but this is such a major change that will not effect just a fringe number of users, and sometimes respecting the legacy of what you built is important. As with anti-aliased font controls, I hope that interpolation options are avalable in future browsers.
Boris Zbarsky from Bugzilla:
The only reason browsers have historically used linear scaling is that nonlinear scaling was
too performance-intensive to be usable on the hardware that was available. But
by now, that's very much less an issue. And nonlinear scaling gives far better
output for the vast majority of images on the web.
That said, in terms of web-based applications (as opposed to web pages),
perhaps having the ability to perform linear scaling is desirable in some
cases. If nothing else, it allows scaling without server round-tripping. I do
still think this is a fairly minor edge case and we should be defaulting to
nonlinear scaling in general.
If we do decide to have a way of specifying the scaling algorithm, I'm not sure
a CSS property is the right way to do it. Adding yet another CSS property has
certain costs (in memory and performance) that don't seem justified by the very
limited use case here... More importantly, what scaling algorithm would work
best is an intrinsic property of the image data and the way that the <img> is
being used in the web page; that is, of the content. So it seems to me that an
attribute (HTML5?) would be more relevant.
If they are saying that computers now have the power and resources to handle interpolation, THEN they should have no problem adding a css attribute for it, but here they argue against adding a css attribute as it requires more resources, but interpolation is justified as an acceptable consumption of more resources?? Very hypocritical... not everybody uses dashed lines via css (insert your favorite odd css attribute here), but it's there because someone does use it. Why don't we throw out every stylistic feature in CSS since apparently software engineers are smarter than everyone else and know what's best for all of us? Websites that like to allow people to change schemes and customize are more likely to benefit from having interpolation options within CSS, and not HTML. Over time, support for filters could be done in this way, too.
> At the very least you should add a toggle in the browser preferences
It's not going in the UI, I can guarantee that (since 99.99% of users would
have no idea what the heck it's talking about). And at that point, having it
is pointless. It's not like you can control what preferences your users have
set anyway.
Because people are too stupid to know any better... nice.
I concede interpolation as a default would be good for most images, but pixel artists and people posting diagrams should have an option, and that option should probably be css based.
