HACKER Q&A
📣 yakubin

Why do Chrome and Edge butcher rendering my photo?


Day to day I use Edge. A while ago there was some drama around it sending the photos you see during browsing to Microsoft for AI “enhancement”[1]. The option to disable this feature was removed[2], so some speculated that the whole feature is removed.

However, I’ve just noticed that one of my photos[3] has crazy artifacts when viewed in Edge, which don't show in Firefox or any native MacOS viewer like Preview or ACDSee (screenshot[4]). The weird thing is I can reproduce the same issue in Chrome (as visible in the screenshot). So I’m wondering if Chrome added a similar “feature” and Edge got it from there again.

(Chrome also lifted the shadows. It's really worrying.)

[1]:

[2]:

[3]:

[4]: (The version on the left basically has minecraft on the right wall. The version on the right doesn't. The version on the right is pitch black on the left wall. The version on the left shows red bricks.)

  👤 zamadatix Accepted Answer ✓
It's worth highlighting the artifacts are always there because they are indeed in the image itself and not pitch black https://i.imgur.com/2FgEXhi.png but the lift of the dark areas brings them up to be much more apparent. They show in Firefox and the native MacOS viewer, they are just much closer to true black so not as apparent.

As to why the lift is occurring in your instance of Chrome: Not sure as it doesn't happen in the latest stable version of Chrome (119.0.6045.105 arm64) for me (on a MacBook Pro using the built in XDR display) so I can't poke around too much at it. That said, it seems highly unlikely it's some AI doom and gloom and more likely something breaking in the color management pipeline. I say this because the exact same effect happens on my color unmanaged Windows 11 setup across Chrome, Firefox, and local image applications and it would seem extremely unlikely AI would just so happen to "enhance" the image in exactly the same way ignoring the sRGB color profile would.

One thing to keep in mind: whether or not you fix this for yourself, this is how many others will see your image anyways. If you need to serve a compressed version it might be good to bring down the ultra dark noise a bit so encoding it as a JPEG doesn't result in it poorly encoding the noise, making it even worse.

👤 yakubin
I can't even find the regression point, since for the last several months <https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-sn...> contains Mac builds that when clicked trigger a popup “You can’t open the application “Chromium.app” because this application is not supported on this Mac.” (“This Mac” is an M1 Mac Mini, i.e. pretty recent). All I know is that in builds from April 2022 it used to work. So... Very professional CI there.

I swear it's always Chrome that's a PITA when it comes to weird regressions like these. Other browser engines aren't so amateurish.