Why won't images show up in Firefox?

July 10, 2006 3:11 PM

Why won't images show up on my website when viewed in Firefox?

From a friend:

I have just recently been attempting some HTML and CSS. The site I've made displays fine in Safari but my images wont show in Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer. Not sure what to do- please help. 

Here is a link: http://students.oxy.edu/atiziani/Web/Untitled4.html

posted by maxreax to computers & internet (7 comments total)

The image “http://students.oxy.edu/atiziani/Web/Header.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://students.oxy.edu/atiziani/Web/JACHeader.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 3:22 PM on July 10, 2006

Sometimes images aren't displayed on their prospective pages, and when I right click on the image and go to "display image" it gives me a message with the following error message.
- The image "[image name]" cannot be displayed because it contains errors. What can I do?
This is a known bug that is being worked on. The image itself is fine, i.e. it contains no errors.
The reason for this behavior appears to be the fact that Mozilla - depending on your Cache settings - requests the image twice. It only appears on websites that do not allow images to be linked to/called directly from outside of their pages. Since Mozilla does not send the referrer (i.e. web address of the page where the file is linked from) the second time it requests the image, the website sends an "access denied" page in HTML form where Mozilla is expecting an image, hence the error messsage [sic] (Mozilla tries to display an image when it receives an HTML page, so for the browser, the "image" contains an error).

--http://mozilla.gunnars.net/mozfaq_use.html#imageerror

Solution: don't return 403 on an image requests that don't include a "referer" [sic].
posted by orthogonality at 3:26 PM on July 10, 2006

The images are saved using CMYK color, which Firefox and IE don't support. Save them as RGB and they should work fine. Photoshop's 'Save For Web...' option should do this by default.
posted by boaz at 3:37 PM on July 10, 2006

It's not a referer problem. Those images are really weird. They contain huge chunks of text embedded in a way that's apparently breaking most image viewers. Preview opens them just fine, as does Safari. But djpeg and Firefox complain.

On preview, what boaz said.
posted by hades at 3:45 PM on July 10, 2006

It sounds like you're creating this using a Mac. Some older Mac tools created a bastard form of JPG file by default which didn't conform to the JPEG spec and wasn't portable.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 4:46 PM on July 10, 2006

I suppose it's theoretically possible that he was using some obsolete, obscure Mac tool, but it seems about a gazillion times more likely he was just editing a CMYK document in Photoshop, which is, after all, the single most ubiquitous image editing program on the planet, and saved the result as a JPEG without converting it to RGB first. [handwave]This is not the OS flamewar you're looking for.[/handwave]
posted by boaz at 6:42 PM on July 10, 2006

She (not he) was creating the pic in Photoshop and left it in CMYK. Easy fix--thanks for everyone's help!
posted by maxreax at 10:08 PM on July 10, 2006