A1Media.ca

I use Mozilla Firefox browser every day, all day, for building websites. The latest version of Firefox included a very ill-advised "improvement" that renders all standalone gif, png, and jpg images centered in the browser window on a black background. The old rendering behavior was to simply display the image in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen on a white background. This old behaviour, although not at all fancy, it is ideal for transparent gif and png images.

Think of the hundreds of millions of gif and png images that are embedded as thumbnails on websites that require the user to click on the thumbnail to view it in the zoomed-in or full size view. Those hundreds of millions of images are now broken and most are unviewable. Technical and academic websites rely heavily on these click-to-view larger transparent gif and png images and now they are screwed.

The fix, unfortunately, isn't a simple toggle in the the Firefox options, nor a more advanced "about:config" setting ... the only way to fix it is to hack the user chrome css settings buried deep, deep down inside the Firefox user-specific application settings. Bah.

Thankfully, I found a simple Firefox add-on that you can install and doesn't even require a reboot to start working. It's called Old Default Image Style and you can get it via the Firefox Addons repository.

Get it. Love it.

In the meantime, until this so-called improvement is rolled back to the old behavior, or improved to deal with transparent images, I will be consulting a Voodoo priestess in order to put a hex on the Firefox UI developers who thought this change was a good idea. I'd like to pay the priestess for the "set hair on fire" hex, but I can only afford the less expensive "chronic toe fungus" hex. Ah well, we do what we can.