Image scaling causes poor quality in firefox/internet explorer but not chrome

See http://jsfiddle.net/aJ333/1/ in Chrome and then in either Firefox or Internet Explorer. The image is originally 120px, and I'm scaling down to 28px, but it looks bad pretty much no matter what you scale it down to.

The image is a PNG and it has an alpha channel (transparency).

Here's the relevant code:

HTML:

<a href="http://tinypic.com?ref=2z5jbtg" target="_blank">
    <img src="http://i44.tinypic.com/2z5jbtg.png" border="0" alt="Image and video hosting by TinyPic">
</a>

CSS:

a {
    width: 28px;
    height: 28px;
    display: block;
}

img {
    max-width: 100%;
    max-height: 100%;
    image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges;
    -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;
}

The image-rendering and -ms-interpolation-mode lines of CSS didn't seem to do anything, but I found them online while doing some research on the problem.

It seems that you are right. No option scales the image better:
http://www.maxrev.de/html/image-scaling.html

I've tested FF14, IE9, OP12 and GC21. Only GC has a better scaling that can be deactivated through image-rendering: -webkit-optimize-contrast. All other browsers have no/poor scaling.

Screenshot of the different output: http://www.maxrev.de/files/2012/08/screenshot_interpolation_jquery_animate.png

Update 2017

Meanwhile some more browsers support smooth scaling:

ME38 (Microsoft Edge) has good scaling. It can't be disabled and it works for JPEG and PNG, but not for GIF.
FF51 (Regarding @karthik 's comment since FF21) has good scaling that can be disabled through the following settings:
```
image-rendering: optimizeQuality
image-rendering: optimizeSpeed
image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges
```
Note: Regarding MDN the optimizeQuality setting is a synonym for auto (but auto does not disable smooth scaling):

The values optimizeQuality and optimizeSpeed present in early draft (and coming from its SVG counterpart) are defined as synonyms for the auto value.
OP43 behaves like GC (not suprising as it is based on Chromium since 2013) and its still this option that disables smooth scaling:
```
image-rendering: -webkit-optimize-contrast
```

No support in IE9-IE11. The -ms-interpolation-mode setting worked only in IE6-IE8, but was removed in IE9.

P.S. Smooth scaling is done by default. This means no image-rendering option is needed!

Late answer but this works:

/* applies to GIF and PNG images; avoids blurry edges */
img[src$=".gif"], img[src$=".png"] {
    image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges;         /* Firefox */
    image-rendering:   -o-crisp-edges;         /* Opera */
    image-rendering: -webkit-optimize-contrast;/* Webkit (non-standard naming) */
    image-rendering: crisp-edges;
    -ms-interpolation-mode: nearest-neighbor;  /* IE (non-standard property) */
}

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/image-rendering

Here is another link as well which talks about browser support:

https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/i/image-rendering/

One way to "normalize" the appearance in the different browsers is using your "server-side" to resize the image. An example using a C# controller:

public ActionResult ResizeImage(string imageUrl, int width)
{
    WebImage wImage = new WebImage(imageUrl);
    wImage = WebImageExtension.Resize(wImage, width);
    return File(wImage.GetBytes(), "image/png");
}

where WebImage is a class in System.Web.Helpers.

WebImageExtension is defined below:

using System.IO;
using System.Web.Helpers;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.Drawing.Drawing2D;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public static class WebImageExtension
{
    private static readonly IDictionary<string, ImageFormat> TransparencyFormats =
        new Dictionary<string, ImageFormat>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase) { { "png", ImageFormat.Png }, { "gif", ImageFormat.Gif } };

    public static WebImage Resize(this WebImage image, int width)
    {
        double aspectRatio = (double)image.Width / image.Height;
        var height = Convert.ToInt32(width / aspectRatio);

        ImageFormat format;

        if (!TransparencyFormats.TryGetValue(image.ImageFormat.ToLower(), out format))
        {
            return image.Resize(width, height);
        }

        using (Image resizedImage = new Bitmap(width, height))
        {
            using (var source = new Bitmap(new MemoryStream(image.GetBytes())))
            {
                using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(resizedImage))
                {
                    g.SmoothingMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.SmoothingMode.AntiAlias;
                    g.InterpolationMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic;
                    g.DrawImage(source, 0, 0, width, height);
                }
            }

            using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
            {
                resizedImage.Save(ms, format);
                return new WebImage(ms.ToArray());
            }
        }
    }
}

note the option InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic. This is the method used by Chrome.

Now you need publish in a web page. Lets going use razor:

<img src="@Url.Action("ResizeImage", "Controller", new { urlImage = "<url_image>", width = 35 })" />

And this worked very fine to me!

Ideally will be better to save the image beforehand in diferent widths, using this resize algorithm, to avoid the controller process in every image load.

(Sorry for my poor english, I'm brazilian...)

Image scaling causes poor quality in firefox/internet explorer but not chrome

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