Chrome and Firefox uses two different scaling algorithms that is probably contributing a lot more to this difference. Chrome is more blurry in general while Firefox is sharper but has slightly more ringing artifacts. Personally I prefer the Firefox version.

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aidenn0 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've noticed that a lot of objective measures of image quality prefer blur to ringing, but many subjective measurements tilt the other way.

	▲	ryandamm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's why you should prefer LPIPS to PSNR. LPIPS is a learned metric that uses subjective human input. That said, it's limited due to the training set, iirc. So we still use PSNR regularly — it's an easily-understood metric with widely-understood limitations, which is in practice not too bad. Devil you know, etc.

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gutechh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I do prefer the firefox look too! I'd be curious to hear your take on what could be the root cause of this. I'm far from a image rendering expert. But I remember when inspecting the edges and curves of the images in a DCT visualizer they were all in the AC coefficients which is what led me to the conclusion of the post.

	▲	debazel 27 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm far from an image rendering expert myself, but I don't think there is a single root cause here. I don't doubt the partial decoding would affect the final result just as the scaling algorithm itself, so in the end it's going to be a combination of it all. The reason I believe the scaling algorithm is contributing more in your particular example, is because it looks almost exactly like a classic B/W comparison between a sharp ringing heavy algorithm and a more blurry one. For reference here is a quick comparison between Lanczos/Bilinear I threw together: https://twinlens.app/compare?share=40973d84a174 It would be interesting to see how your example would look if you used colors instead, where the ringing artifacts become a lot more obvious. Like this one: https://twinlens.app/compare?share=8fb890a5820e
	▲	ack_complete an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I wonder if this is a gamma correction related. JPEG encodes directly in a non linear color encoding (full-range YCbCr), so the partial decoding may be effectively scaling without gamma correction.