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Browser-Specific Image Problems
There have been some "images don't display in all browsers" problems. This is a test of that. Each image is "Test Image" in magenta/pink letters on a white background.
PNG
JPG
TIF
BMP
Tested using browserstack.com:
- Windows 7 & 10 Firefox: TIF does not display
- Windows 7 & 10 Chrome: TIF does not display
- Windows 7 & 10 Opera: TIF does not display
- Windows 7 & 10 IE: BMP does not display
- Windows 7 & 10 Edge: TIF does not display
- Mac Safari: No problems!
- Mac Firefox: TIF does not display
- Mac Chrome: TIF does not display
- Mac Opera: TIF does not display
- Mac Edge: TIF does not display
- Android (Google Pixel 4) Chrome: TIF does not display
- Android (Google Pixel 4) Firefox: TIF does not display
- iOS (iPhone 11) Safari: No problems!
- iOS (iPhone 11) Chrome: No problems!
This appears to not be a Codidact problem per se:
- If I try to display the files directly (file://c:/etc. as a URL) in Firefox, the PNG, JPG and BMP all work as expected but TIF ends up as a download.
- Another (ahem) helpful site has some information about this problem.
So it appears that JPG and PNG are the only truly reliable image formats. Actually, I'm 99+% certain that GIF is also universal, but generally speaking JPG and PNG are preferred to GIF.
Probably no quick & easy solution. Suggestions:
- Check filetype on upload and only allow if filetype (based on contents, not simply file extension) is PNG, JPG or GIF. This has the advantage of not just blocking marginal image formats but also helping to block malicious Javascript or other nasty stuff.
- Detect BMP and TIF and offer to convert to JPG or PNG using ImageMagick or a similar system.
1 answer
Completed pending deploy: we'll only allow web-safe image types (PNG, JPEG, GIF). I looked at automatically converting other image types, but it's frustratingly difficult in our current version of Rails - once we upgrade (no timeline on that yet), we might be able to look again.
3 comments
Might I suggest also adding webp? It's gaining some significant acceptance and I think is now in all browser but legacy IE.
Mozilla Developer Network has a nice article on image types and current browser support; I'd recommend accepting apng, gif, ico, jpeg, png, svg, & webp.
@PeterCooperJr.: IIUC the ending of APNG files is PNG, and the file formats are compatible (that is, a program supporting PNG but not APNG will see it as normal PNG image showing the first frame), so APNG should be automatically accepted if PNG is, unless special checks are done that filter them out.
4 comments
I can see "Test Image" for all 4 image types. Using Edge on Win10. — Olin Lathrop 10 months ago
I suspect this is IE/Edge/Windows. TIFF images seem to work there, but not in other environments. — ArtOfCode 10 months ago
I can't see the TIFF image. For the others I see "Test image" in magenta/pink letters (not sure if that's what I'm supposed to see - maybe you should say "if you can read these words you can see the image") — Andy aka 10 months ago
Additional data point: Waterfox on Linux doesn't show TIFF, but all others. — celtschk 3 months ago