Blinded by the light! – An improved image viewing experience in Firefox
4 January, 2012 § 19 Comments
Starting with Firefox 11 (currently in Aurora), directly viewed images in Firefox are finally treated as a first-class citizen within the web browser. Thanks to the contributions of Carlo Alberto Ferraris, images are now centered vertically and horizontally and placed upon a neutral/dark grey background [1].
Browsing the internet with the lights turned off and clicking on a link to an image used to result in short term blindness, what I like to call getting “blinded by the light”. It’s crazy that Bruce Springsteen and Manfred Mann have been talking about this use case for so long and it took until now for it to get fixed đ
Here’s some screenshots of what it looks like in case you’re using something older than Firefox Aurora or one of those other web browsers:
The cool kids using Firefox Aurora or Firefox Nightly are seeing and experiencing this change already. Join us today!
[1] For those feeling like this is too much change, Dagger has created the “Old Default Image” add-on that adds the ability to revert to the previous behavior or change the background color to your own liking.
JAWS 
Nice addition but why isn’t it styled the same way as videos were before? I understand the reasons for not adding a drop shadow but why not using the same color and image for the background? đ
Good questions đ
These were intentional decisions. The lack of drop shadow is due to transparent images not always having a visible rectangular shape. The lack of the textured background is also due to transparent images and confusing users who think the texture is part of the image.
I could see a good argument for adding the texture on the standalone page, considering the separation problem isn’t necessarily solved as it is now anyways.
Can you file a bug to add the texture to standalone images?
Hi, this bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=717226 is for changing the shade of grey, maybe it could be used.