Pixelated images in safari, please help.

This has happened to me. I bet you have recently used a mobile dongle for internet access yes/no?

I think that there may be some kind of compression technique that dongles use although I do not know this as fact! You may want to try clearing out all your cache etc. and try again. I can;t remember exactly what I did as it was a while ago but that would be a good start.

Your screenshots are too small for anything to show in them other than the very heavy JPEG compression artifacts in the dark background of the python photo, which are in the photo file as it was uploaded to the website, not on your screen. I have no idea what you mean about the Google banner — I don't see any Google banner in the screenshots.

The website operator is re-compressing and probably reducing the resolution of your already-compressed JPEG image to take up less space on his server, and drastically diminishing its quality in the process. He does the same to everyone else's photos. The Google banner looks just the same way to me as it does to you, in each of five different web browsers (Google Chrome, Safari, Camino, Opera and Firefox) — it's a textured background. There is nothing wrong with your display or with Safari.

I just want to confirm that I also see the same issue on my MacBook Air and my wife's MacBook. I have recently used 3G and wifi tethering via my iPhone 3GS on my MBA but my wife has not. We also visited a friend with MacBook and she has had the same issue. Seems like out of a blue the pictures in both Safari and Firefox (any page) are downgraded in quality. When I hover my mouse pointer over the picture (on any of the three mentioned computers) a pop up shows saying "ShiftR will improve the quality of this picture; Shift+A will improve the quality of all pictures on this page+". It does work (takes some time) however it is not something I am aware of enabling. I would appreciate if anyone with the knowledge how to get rid off it posts. I assume I am experiencing/observing the same issue as the author of the original post.

Yes, I see the big ugly squares. They are what appears whenever extremely heavy JPEG compression is applied to a low-resolution image tht has relatively large areas of similar colors. Something somewhere is applying such compression to the pages, or portions of them, that you are viewing in your browser(s). Your MBP is not doing that: it can't. Either the page images (or parts of them) are being compressed by the website owners or, if every web page is affected, they are being compressed by your ISP in the process of being transmitted to you, as Gordito suggests. That would greatly increase the speed of page loading, but at the expense of image quality. You wouldn't see the image degradation on an iPhone or cell phone — the screen is too small — but on the MBP's high-resolution display it would be much more apparent, IF the MBP were receiving the signal in the same highly compressed form as the phone. If the MBP receives the same web pages through an ISP that doesn't over-compress them, they'll look the way they ought to look. So if you are receiving these web pages through a cellular ISP rather than through a broadband connection, take the MBP to a wifi hotspot and connect through wifi instead. I bet things will look different then.

Compressing images is something a web browser can't do: a browser just displays the signal that comes to it.

I'm glad to hear you've sorted it out, bonustokin. Thanks for posting back with your findings.

To all kind people who replied; true, once I connected the MBA to internet via local cable network (and also a wifi at a hotel) all pictures are being loaded properly without any compression. Thank you also for explaining that no compression happens in the web browsers.

Alright, I'm using O2 mobil 3G dongle, and even on ethernet I get compressed images. But I'm going to reset Safari and restart the puter to see if that works. Thanks for the post!

eww wrote:
Yes, I see the big ugly squares. They are what appears whenever extremely heavy JPEG compression is applied to a low-resolution image tht has relatively large areas of similar colors. Something somewhere is applying such compression to the pages, or portions of them, that you are viewing in your browser(s). Your MBP is not doing that: it can't.

Completely false. Your Macbook Pro is entirely capable of compressing images client-side, but it doesn't. Why? Because there would be no point. By the time the data got to your computer, there wouldn't be any reason to compress it, as it had already downloaded in its entirety.

An ISP does this to improve speeds and lower bandwidth. Netzero used to do this back when it was actually $0 to use; nowadays, 3G providers do it to keep the network from becoming overly congested.

Interestingly, one browser, the mobile version of Opera, does this, however they don't do it client-side. Instead, they route and optimize data through their own proprietary servers and feed it down to the user.

Message was edited by: dclowd9901

Thanks for the nitpicking correction, dclowd. Yes, of course it's possible to compress images on a MBP. What I should have said was that the *web browser* running on the MBP couldn't compress the images.