Monday, September 20, 2010

Want to crash your browser ?

One of the best images at #Wikimedia #Commons contains five images of the scull of a male Chlorocebus sabaeus

Want to crash your browser ?
The picture is gorgeous, the toothy grin of the skull shows off really well that this beastie has what it takes when your fingers come to close. When you read the Commons page of the picture you are warned..
Some browsers may have trouble displaying this image at full resolution: This image has a large number of pixels and may either not load properly or cause your browser to freeze.

There is even a link to a non-Flash tool that complained to me that it is not "a valid JPG file". There are open source tools that do a credible job paging through a big file like this one (35.56 MB). It is not even a genuinely big file. Many maps are much larger..

Why not choose a program that does a splendid job so that we do not have to warn people that they might crash their browser when they want to see pictures like this in all its glory?
Thanks,
       GerardM

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

No problem opening that file in Google Chrome. Did use 720MB RAM at some point in time trying to display the image.

André said...

Not even a hint of a problem using Firefox 3.6.10

TheDJ said...

The tools for large images are maintained by Daniel Schwen (User:Dschwen). It uses IIPImage http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/, "an Open Source light-weight streaming client-server system for the web-based viewing and zooming of ultra high-resolution images. It is designed to be bandwidth and memory efficient and usable even over a slow internet connection."

You can even twitter them http://twitter.com/iipimage