The Trekkie's Forum

In the last week my browsers (IE and Firefox) has loaded really low quality pixelated images, where previously I got hi-res images. When you mouse over the image in IE I get "shift-r improves the quality of this image, Ctrl-F5 improves the quality of all images on this page" and on FireFox "Shift-R improves quality of that picture and SHIFT-A improves the quality of all picture on that page"

I dont get this on my browsers through the works network, but using any Vodacom modem gets this.

Appareantly Vodacom and some other service providers have applied "image recompression" on their network that loads these crappy pics in a bid to reduce bandwidth. The problem is that it seems they have done this without informing anyone, and it sure annoys me to have to press Shift-a on each and every page.

Trawling the net it seems it is not something that you can request them to switch off.

The problem becomes worse if the images are displayed through a flash or lightbox interface like many of us use on our pages and Flickr uses for the larger image view, as pressing shift-a or r makes no difference.

I have no solution on IE, but on firefox you can solve this by:

download and install the Modify Headersaddon for firefox, then go to the main menu and select plugins

On the plugin page select options in the Modify Headers plug-in
once the page opens there will be a drop-down box at the top select Add

enter the follwing:
1st box: Pragma
2nd box: no-cache
then click add

select Add on the drop-down again
1st box: cache control
2nd box: no-cache
then click add.

Make sure both have a green dot next to it to show it is active.

Images previously loaded will still look pixelated due to them being cached, so the best option is to clear the cache.

you will now no longer get these rubbish images or the annoying pop-up message

Last edited by Imax (22-06-2012 11:35:15)