I just installed Firefox on one of the Acer Aspire E15 reference devices that we're using (in Windows 10, default configuration / resolution, etc.) I went to https://getfirefox.com and clicked the download button (which gave me a stub installer). Then I ran the installer. See attached screenshot of what I saw during installation. ACTUAL RESULTS: The edges of the "Firefox" text look super corrupt/broken to me -- looks like scaling artifacts. (The "F" is fine, but the dot of the "i" has weird edges, as do the edges of "e", "f", "o", and "x".) The "pencil-in-a-blue-pin" image has smeared edges on the bottom (the pointy part) of the image, too. EXPECTED RESULTS: Crisp text and images. This is the very first impression we're making on our users -- we want it to be a good one!

This was Firefox 53, downloaded today (May 1). My resolution is 1920x1080 -- this is the default configuration, and it also seems like the highest resolution that my device supports. (So I don't think this is a HiDPI sort of issue, though I could be wrong.)

It looks like you do have scaling turned on and set to about 125%, because that's the only way I can get a screenshot that looks like that; personally on a 1080p display, I would probably turn that off. ;) I'm not immediately sure what we can do about this. We don't really do this scaling ourselves, we just ask Windows what the appropriate size is. But maybe there another way to do that to get better results; it bears looking into.

(In reply to Matt Howell [:mhowell] from comment #2) > It looks like you do have scaling turned on and set to about 125%, because > that's the only way I can get a screenshot that looks like that Thanks! After I search settings for "Scaling", I do indeed see that "Change the size of text, apps, and other items" is set to "125% (Recommended)" Sadly, that is the default (on this device at least; not sure if it's default for all new Win10 installations), and Windows says it's "recommended" for some reason. > I'm not immediately sure what we can do about this. We don't really do this > scaling ourselves, we just ask Windows what the appropriate size is. But > maybe there another way to do that to get better results; it bears looking > into. Definitely, yeah. Thanks!

Here's what the same part of the install process looks like with today's Nightly. It looks much better, IMO -- not sure if it's because we use things that scale nicer in our Nightly branding, or if we've fixed something since the 53 release, or what.

The text is clearly differently-sized between the two screenshots, so the rendering differences there might be hard to reason about. But the pencil "pin" graphic is the same size and coloring -- and the Nightly version of that is clearly WAY crisper than the release graphic. So that's clearly something that we already know how to make better. Maybe that's something that changed recently and is already riding the trains -- if so, great! But if not, we should fix that so Release can look as good as Nightly. Matt, do you know anything about that by any chance, or do you know who'd know?

Well, I learned something today. Turns out the images we use in the nightly stub are way higher resolution than the ones we have for release. That's why they look so much better when scaled, there's more detail in them to start with. I'm guessing the reason for this is to keep the file size down for the release stub. rstrong, do you know if I'm right about that? If that's the only reason, then I might try to argue for changing it, because the difference is pretty striking.

(In reply to Matt Howell [:mhowell] from comment #6) > Well, I learned something today. Turns out the images we use in the nightly > stub are way higher resolution than the ones we have for release. That's why > they look so much better when scaled, there's more detail in them to start > with. > > I'm guessing the reason for this is to keep the file size down for the > release stub. rstrong, do you know if I'm right about that? If that's the > only reason, then I might try to argue for changing it, because the > difference is pretty striking. Definitely not and the dimensions of that image should be about 4 times the size similar to nightly, etc. and should be able to have the same number of colors. Not sure how that got overlooked for this image. Also see bug 1162796 for a similar bug

(In reply to Robert Strong [:rstrong] (use needinfo to contact me) from comment #7) > (In reply to Matt Howell [:mhowell] from comment #6) > > Well, I learned something today. Turns out the images we use in the nightly > > stub are way higher resolution than the ones we have for release. That's why > > they look so much better when scaled, there's more detail in them to start > > with. > > > > I'm guessing the reason for this is to keep the file size down for the > > release stub. rstrong, do you know if I'm right about that? If that's the > > only reason, then I might try to argue for changing it, because the > > difference is pretty striking. > Definitely not and the dimensions of that image should be about 4 times the > size similar to nightly, etc. and should be able to have the same number of > colors. Not sure how that got overlooked for this image. > > Also see bug 1162796 for a similar bug Correction regarding 4 times the size. iirc it was 4 times the size of an image without scaling.

This is going to take a back seat (and probably will end up getting WONTFIX'd) because it looks like we're going to land a streamlined stub installer that doesn't use any of the affected images; see bug 1365998.