graphics in AOL's Web Browser

Factual Questions
1

I am putting together a personal homepage with some photographs on it. Yesterday I decided to see how the page looked on my brother’s computer. He’s on AOL. After he logged in I entered the URL in the space in the AOL window and the page came up. I found that most of the pictures looked terrible! The JPEG files looked like they were saved with too much compression, so that parts of a picture with subtle gradients in tone would be simplified to 3 or 4 shades of the same color. At first I thought it was the number of colors supported by the screen, but it was set at Millions of colors. Then I thought it was some other kind of screen problem, but when I launched Netscape and opened the same page in that browser, the images looked OK.

So: What’s the matter with AOL’s Web browser (or with the computer) that the same image looks OK with one browser and not OK with another? I thought JPEGs were browser-independent. FWIW, the computer I was using was an Apple Powerbook that’s a couple of years old.

2

Aol’s browser is set to “use compressed graphics” as the default.

You can get the same clarity as other browsers by going to “Preferences”, “WWW”, “Graphics” and deselect the box that says “use compressed graphics”. You can get there by opening AOL, not by going to “my computer”. One of the icons across the top should take you to preferences.

Why is compressed the default? Because AOL is graphics heavy and compressed graphics are quicker.

Sometimes, I open up explorer or netscape after I log on with AOL, and I can surf right through the browser. Sometimes, I like AOL, so I use it, but other times, once logged in, you can minimize AOL and open explorer - since you’re connected, you can surf away with a bigger viewing area…

3

Why would I want to go to your computer? :smiley:

Sorry, just a little joke from someone who doesn’t use Windows. Thanks a lot for the answer! I didn’t know image compression could be controlled by the user.