Which Web Browser Is Best For High Resolution Images?
You have just finished taking photos from your latest vacation. You used the latest Sony A7 III Alpha mirrorless camera so your images are high resolution full frame 24 MP captures. Now you want to upload them to the Internet on a photo sharing website and view it from your web browser.
Now here is the question, which web browser provides the best in displaying the high resolution image quality of your photos? After all, you spent so much to get the best that you want to see them at their best as well when posted online.
A browser is what allows you to view content from the Internet. It is a software application that gets the information as content from the Internet in order to display back to the user. The most popular ones are Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Each browser will parse the code to properly show the content on your display e.g. smartphone screen or computer monitor.
Let’s look at how a web browser works by analyzing its high-level architecture.
The UI or User Interface is how users interact with the web browser. This is via a “window” that opens up the application on screen. The browser engine acts as the bridge to the lower level components of the web browser, specifically the rendering engine. The rendering engine is responsible for interpreting the HTML, XML documents and images that are formatted using CSS layouts. The standard for web browsers content is as of this writing HTML 5.0, CSS 3.0 and Javascript ES6. Another job the rendering engine does is messaging with the networking, interpreters (Javascript) and UI backend components. The networking component deals with HTTP requests. Interpreters handle the translation and execution of script codes. UI backend deals with windows and interface appearance that relies on the operating system. The persistent data is information about cache, cookies, bookmarks and preferences specific to the user.
Where do graphics fit in on all this?
As we can see, the web browser does not render graphics, but more so renders content. What it does is properly display the content, whether it is text, image or video for the user and nothing more. Graphics is not magically rendered because you have a particular web browser. You don’t get high resolution image from the web browser, it is dependent on your imaging equipment i.e. the camera you used to shoot the image. Now for displaying high resolution images on your computer, we will get to that soon after we discuss more about the web browser’s role.
The type of web browser you use is also dependent on your operating system. By default, if you are using a Mac it will be Safari. Windows users have Microsoft Edge. Linux and other Unix-like variants will have Mozilla Firefox. A popular browser used by users regardless of operating system is Google Chrome. There are also alternative and less mainstream web browsers like Opera and Brave.
Web browsers all do the same thing and that is serve and display content from the Internet to the user. So the photo you uploaded to the photo sharing website, can be viewed by any browser.
How about the quality of the image?
Image quality is more a function dependent on your hardware, or the specs of your computer or device. It will rely on your display’s supported resolution, the higher the better. If you are using a MacBook Pro, your display resolution is Retina HD or 2880 x 1800 pixels. If you shot an image at 4928 x 3264 pixels, then this display is definitely capable of showing the high resolution image.
The web browser does not in any way have any capability to alter the image’s true resolution or quality. If it looks horrible, it can be an issue with how the image is being rendered by the browser. That could be a bug, but those are quite rare. Instead, it is more likely to be your display resolution not being high enough to match the image’s resolution.
How come my image was shot in high resolution but looks low res?
If you are viewing your images from a display that is below HD quality at < 720 pixels vertical, than you will not be able to view your image in high resolution. Your images are high resolution no doubt, but it is your display that cannot show it.
The video card or GPU can accelerate image quality but that is mostly for video or animation. Instead look at the specs of your display. On smartphones QHD @ 1440 pixels is considered high resolution while on most of today’s desktop and laptop computers anything with a display resolution > 720 pixels is high resolution. A 1080 pixel display is ideal.
It is the pixel density or ppi (pixels per inch) that determines how good a display is in showing high resolution images. The ppi is the ratio of pixels to the diagonal size of the screen. Image resolution is irregardless of the screen size, so if your display has a high pixel density at 380 ppi even if it’s a 6.5" smartphone screen, you will see your high resolution images.
Therefore it is not the browser that determines image quality after all. It is your display and video hardware.
=======================================
You can read more about high resolution quality here:
https://medium.com/hd-pro/pixel-count-does-matter-in-digital-photography-a4e5d69c4540
