Safari 9 showing blurred images on certain websites

Question

Safari 9 showing blurred images on certain websites

There seems to be an issue with displaying images in Safari - particularly when browsing photo albums on OneDrive. The problem is that the images appear to be slightly blurred and somewhat not as sharp as they are supposed to be while navigating the website - and this issue occurs only in Safari (works just fine in Chrome and Firefox and it used to work properly in Safari as well until I upgraded to El Capitan). Here's what the difference between Safari and Chrome looks like:

The image as displayed in Safari:

http://postimg.org/image/peguvs75p/

The image as displayed in Chrome:

http://postimg.org/image/8ou98dpez/

I have tried restoring the settings to "default" in Safari, cleaning the cache and other temp files and restarting OS X. Nothing seems to help resolve the issue. Problem occurs on other websites as Flickr as well but since I primarily use OneDrive, this is a huge issue for me. Any suggestions for what might be causing the problem / how to get rid of it?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11), null

Posted on Oct 18, 2015 6:09 AM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

685,311 points

Jan 29, 2017 6:27 AM in response to rottencabbages

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem or a suggestion for change. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem/suggested change solved sooner.

Feedback

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Answer 2

piii666

Level 1

18 points

Jan 29, 2017 6:03 AM in response to Walter Beagley

I've just spotted this problem. I normally use Firefox on OSX (Sierra) but I needed to upload some folders with pictures to google drive, so I went to Chrome to drag&drop them in one move (AFAIK only chrome supports folders). Then I've tried to preview those JPGs and they were blurred (softened), so I cursed and switched to Firefox - and they were sharp! So, I've opened Safari and they were blurred too. It appears that some smoothing is being applied on Chrome and Safari.

You can test that by trying to resize the window of Safari but don't finish the resize - I mean, keep the mouse/touchpad pressed in the operation of resizing - you will notice the sharpness is back ⚠ - the blurring effect is only applied when you confirm/finish resizing (when you unpress the mouse lets say). In Chrome the blurring effect is applied almost immediately while resizing though you can see that image is sharp when you resize but it becomes blurred when you stop moving your mouse.

Thus, I think it is kinda OSX issue, the way it smoothens bitmaps? Firefox is able to circumvent that behavior somehow.

BTW, I've got macbook pro 2012 (13" without retina of course). All browsers are up-to-date.

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Answer 3

piii666

Level 1

18 points

Jan 29, 2017 6:03 AM in response to piii666

Since I can't edit my previous post I reply to myself:

To reproduce you don't need to use google drive (to cut off allegations that gdrive website does something nasty), just grab a decent high-resolution JPG (for example 6000x4000 72dpi) and open it locally in all those 3 browsers and compare how it looks on each browser + try to resize the window as I've described in the previous post.

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Answer 4

Jan 29, 2017 6:09 AM in response to piii666

Hi and thanks for sharing this information.

I have tried the same local high-resolution image in the three browsers and have come to the same conclusion. It is, as you mention, especially easy to notice when resizing the window. How crazy is that! Apparently not that many people work with such images in browsers, but I can't wrap my head around how Apple missed it. Especially after it has been reported numerous times...

Quite disturbing that it may be an OS issue and one that is arguably of lesser importance; I'm now afraid we might never see a fix for this.

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Answer 5

Jan 29, 2017 6:30 AM in response to Eric Root

What makes you think I haven't sent them feedback? Frankly, they don't care about user feedback 🙂

And as I said, this is a relatively minor issue. If they can leave major bugs without a fix for months on end, there is no hope they will ever fix something so trivial.

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Answer 6

piii666

Level 1

18 points

Jan 29, 2017 7:04 AM in response to rottencabbages

Yesterday I have reported this behavior as a bug to Apple thru their Apple Bug Reporter (bug id: 30248569). We will see.

It might not be necessarily OSX bug, it might just be Safari (and Chrome) issue how they resample image using not very best algorithm. It might be worth to issue a similar bug to Google regarding their Chrome. Google may respond quicker and shed some light regarding the cause.

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Answer 7

Eric Root

Level 10

685,311 points

Oct 18, 2015 6:36 AM in response to rottencabbages

Safari - Unsupported third-party add-ons may cause Safari to unexpectedly quit or have performance issues

Safari doesn't load a page or webpage items are missing

Safari/other browsers – Website not loading

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Answer 8

Oct 18, 2015 8:03 AM in response to Eric Root

Hey, I have already tried most of the steps suggested in these articles.

I have no addons except for AdBlock, which I disabled and then nothing really changed.

The webpage is loading normally, except for the blurred images (I have no problems with connecting to the website and performing different tasks online). Clearing the cache does not help. It seems like Safari is loading the image and what I get is some sort of preview, which is supposed to be replaced with the real image once the loading is completed. At least that's how it used to work like before. I can see the same blurry image while Chrome is loading it, but it stays on for like maximum one second. Whereas Safari seems to get stuck with the preview and doesn't even try to load the full image anymore.

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Answer 9

Oct 29, 2015 3:22 AM in response to rottencabbages

Well, it appears the issue is gone. The problem is gone as suddenly and as unexpectedly as it first appeared. I haven't done any updates or changes to system settings these days so I have no idea what solved it but I don't really care as long as things work.

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Answer 10

Jan 23, 2016 6:52 AM in response to rottencabbages

I Thought the Safari blur might have something to do with the new retina display. But when I line up the same image in Photoshop and Safari, actual size, the Safari images looks much softer. Very distressing as I use html albums for organizing my photos. I will try another browser, but hope this can be fixed. I have no added extensions in Safari. Changing monitor resolution settings doesn't help.

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