Displaying standalone images on dark background
By glazou on Thursday 22 December 2011, 15:35 - Mozilla - Permalink
That's in Firefox recent builds. Nice. In particular for dark images with a lot of alpha transparency 
Now click on the image below to see it standalone. I find the result incredibly disturbing in terms of contrasts. That will probably be a severe accessibility issue for contrast-impaired people. Why was such a change done instead of adding a new checkbox preference to the Content panel of the preferences window "View images over dark background", unchecked by default?
Comments
But bright was bad for white images. It really depends on the image. Maybe a toggle button in one side of the browser? Or an algorithm to determine the best background?
I say go with the algorithm, but also give an unchecked checkbox for darker backgrounds.
At the same time I'm not sure people "view image" on its own so often, but as always YMMV.
Depends on what sites you visit. "View Image", in the form of a direct link to an image file, can be used VERY often and I wouldn't have it any other way.
For example, on any futaba-style imageboards (eg. 4chan) and on many Tumblr photoblogs, it'd result in MANY people screaming bloody murder if the site were to wrap the images in a page just to get back to a white background because it would break DownThemAll!.
Oh well. Yet another (http://tinyurl.com/7rghrkm) thing to "un-regress" via Stylish when I encounter it. I doubt it'll be hard to reset the background color to white.
Daniel,
I'm the original reporter of the bug and the one that provided the patch. It took over 3 years to have it accepted but I think it was worth the time. My main use case is photography (where the white background is unnerving), and the only thing I can say about images with transparency is that, *by definition* and no matter how you look at it, any background color is equally arbitrary. Even the "checkerboard pattern" used in image editing programs does not work well for ALL images!
The only way out is some kind of adaptive behavior. As I'm sure you know, patches are welcome.
@CAFxX: sorry but your explanation is typical of a developer not willing to dive into complex code and hence letting the user deal with the issues raised by his decisions. White background is a problem for you, dark background is a problem for all people not looking at photos but bitmaps. A normal compromise would be to adapt the background depending on the image, this is DOABLE, there is even a Firefox add-on with such code.
Again, images on white backgrounds are more common in browsers because of contrast issues. Your decision has an accessibility side that you do not seem to really measure.
> dark background is a problem for all people not looking at photos but bitmaps
Downright wrong. As I already said, for "images with transparency is that, *by definition* and no matter how you look at it, any background color is equally arbitrary". This is not objectable. Not at all. If you want an example, have a look an image like this http://www.livepino.it/stuff/livepi... and *please* tell me how well it works on a white background. And I'm not even contrast-impaired! (remember: my point is that no single color is better than the other for images with trasparency).
OTOH, if we talk about photography, white is downright problematic.
If we take *both* the above considerations, you should be able to see that the net effect is *positive*. I'm not saying this is the best *we* can do, it's just *better than before*. And that's why I'm encouraging *everybody* to improve my work.
Now, if you actually care to understand the reason why this wasn't exposed as a pref, or why it has no adaptive behaviour, it's simply due to the fact that the more changes you stuff in a single bug, the harder it gets to have them accepted (beside the vastly higher amount of time it requires).
As a side note, one of the effects of my patch is that is now way easier to configure the background color. Go ahead.
Any reason why you do a blogpost instead of filling new bug? If you filled new bug I don't see such bug in dependency of Bug 376997. I see Bug 713230 from Pascal which is right for your image I think. So do you have another problem with this change?
Creation visible preference "go back to the old style" for every change is not right I think.
Carlo Alberto Ferraris, thanks for your work!
CAFxX, FF is not Darktable/ Adobe Lightroom. The primary use case for people using FF to look at single images is web bitmaps, the overwhelming majority of which are designed with light backgrounds in mind. People trying to abuse FF as a photo viewer are corner cases, and people using it for serious photography purposes are nutcases.
You've succeeded after three years of effort in hijacking the browser to make it less useful for most users. Congratulations. I hope you're tremendously proud of yourself. Go take a hike.
Transparency means "hey bro' this will keeps it's beauty everywhere." not "oh why user doesn't use my colors?". No no and no. If a simple and legitimate user choice f**k up your art then you have done it wrongly. Yes you have to manually add white background it it really matter.
Same contrast issue with snow leopard Applications drawer of the dock : dark icons ( like BG one) are annoying.
I wonder why so much icon designers think alpha without contrasted outlines or halo (blur) but I'm not enough brilliant to complain or argue so I fix just for me. I add light blue halo directly on the BlueGriffon's icns. 30 sec with gimp and a bit less with inkscape.
@Dan:
I am one of those people who view a lot of "web bitmaps".
And I'm very happy this change was made. It's really like CAFxX says. Every color is arbitrary. But my own experience is that a dark background is much less arbitry that a white one.
It's sad you're so sarcastic during christmas. The patch is not set in stone. Everyone can improve it further.
M.C.
Congratulations CAFxX you fucked us all over.
Dav,
believe me when I say I proposed this change because I thought it was an improvement. I'm sure you will be able to cope somehow. Or, even better, to improve the situation for everybody.
Could we use the background color that was behind the image on the original page? (When you right-click an image and choose "View Image")
maybe gray like in http://d.pr/uTIA would be better than white or black?
@Jesse Ruderman
What if the page uses another image as the background? What color should we use in that case?
And what if the image we're looking at is the only defined background?
Let alone, what if you type the URL of the image directly?
@\*/
It already is gray (#333). If you see it as black, you should really calibrate your monitor.
Everyone calm down
I think that everybody will agree that the use of 'view image' is not the most often used feature in Firefox - it is even probably far in the list. The choice done does not please everyone, but please some person, the previous choice had the same problem. The solution ? Extension of course, that's why Firefox is cool, you can adapt it to your personal taste easily, and everyone can do so.
Then, it is true that for a change that is most certainly a matter of taste (no really better solution, except an adaptative one probably, but why bloat the core code with that if it is only for a minority of users as extension can do it?) the reviewer should have blocked the change and kept the status quo - in this cases an extension ('view photo' or whatever, that could add more feature to browse, zoom...) would have been a better answer.
(on a additional note, it is interesting to see on home, work, friends screens how different this dark gray (#333) can be - whereas white is way less problematic)