Firefox Frustration

July 6, 2009 9:47 PM

WebDesignFilter: Why is Firefox resizing my images?

My site displays a random image to visitors in the top right corner. When I view the image in IE (in Windows) or Opera (in OSX) the image displays correctly. However, when I view the image in Firefox (in OSX), it is smaller (and therefore blurry).

You can see the problem by following these steps:

1. Visit the homepage: http://warandhealth.com/.

2. If you are in Firefox, the image in the top right is resized (slightly smaller) than it should be. If you are not in Firefox, the image is displayed correctly.

3. If in Firefox, right click on the image and select "View Image". This displays you the non-resized image.

4. Click the back arrow navigation bar.

5. Click the forward arrow in the navigation bar. Now are seeing the resized image.

6. Click on the image once and firefox will display the image in the correct dimensions.

It does not matter if I specify the image dimensions in CSS or even html, Firefox always resizes the image.

Why is this? How can I make firefox display the image correctly?

posted by chrisalbon to technology (7 comments total)

A wild guess: do you have View->Zoom->Zoom Text Only turned off? (I always turn it on, I don't want images resized when I resize text.)
posted by fings at 9:57 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

I don't know the exact cause, but I'd do two things:
1. Check it out in BrowserShots, to see if it's your specific version of Firefox. Sometimes bugs can show up on a specific version on a specific browser.
2. If so, shoot a message onto the appropriate mailing list. They're listed here, and I would most likely try support-firefox, dev-tech-css, or dev-web-development (in that order, but the first response should direct you to the right spot).
posted by spiderskull at 10:07 PM on July 6

Oh, and just as a head's up, the BrowserShots website has a daily limit for how many times free users can send sites to it in a day. So be frugal with your clicks.
posted by spiderskull at 10:08 PM on July 6

Looks fine to me in FF 3.5 (on linux), and inspection via Firebug shows that the style/DOM dimensions match the real dimensions of the image. There is a 0.1em (shows as 1px) padding around it which probably doesn't need to be there, maybe that's screwing up in an earlier version of FF?

If you aren't already using Firebug to diagnose things like this, you'll find it will help.
posted by cowbellemoo at 10:10 PM on July 6

It's not resized or wrong for me, FF 3.5 in OSX 10.5.8... and also FF 3.5 in XP SP3.

"Maybe it's just you."
posted by rokusan at 10:24 PM on July 6

Are you sure you haven't zoomed the page in Firefox inadvertently? (Firefox does remember the zoom setting for viewed pages across refreshes and sessions). Hit CTRL-0 (CMD-0 if you are on a Mac - that's the numeral zero in both cases) to reset the zoom to normal in order to double-check.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 10:33 PM on July 6

Oh bugger, Bora Horza Gobuchul hit the nail on the head. How embarrassing...

Cheers all.
posted by chrisalbon at 10:38 PM on July 6