GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 693434
Fuzzy/blurry icons in application switcher (Alt+Tab)
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:17:30 UTC
Created attachment 235522 [details] actual fuzzy icon (Evolution) The icons in the application switcher seem to be scaled badly, so that they are fuzzy. The two attached screenshots can be compared by quickly switching between them. The first is a screenshot of the actual icons. The second is a screenshot where the icon of Evolution has been replaced by a manually scaled one (to 96x96). What's noticeable is that the height is the same, but the width is wider for the fuzzy one. GNOME Shell 3.6.2
Created attachment 235523 [details] expected icon (Evolution, manually scaled to 96x96)
Someone suggested that this could be because the icon isn't pixel aligned. I checked and indeed it isn't. Couldn't say for sure that that's the reason though.
Created attachment 237918 [details] fuzzy icons But is pixel alignment really the issue? I just repeated Robin's experiment: the top row of icons is a screenshot. The bottom row are 256x256px (png) icons, reduced in size to 96x96 (using Inkscape). Every icon looks crisper in the bottom row.
Note that the screenshot in the previous comment is fuzzier than the actual screen (what's up with that, anyway?)
Depending on the canvas dimensions/offset a bitmap can shift by a subpixel thus being rendered fuzzy exported, despite looking alright on canvas.
In gnome-shell 3.8.4, the problem seems to be gone. I'm hesitant to close the bug though, because it would be good to know WHY the problem no longer exists.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.