Pixen vs Seashore and Firefox vs Chrome

So I was just playing with some ideas to create my own Tumblr theme, an I noticed a few differences between the above mentioned applications.

This isn’t a debate about which is better, this is just a couple of oddities I’ve noticed.

Pixen vs Seashore

These are very different applications and I’m using them for very specific tasks, which one may be better suited for than the other.

Pixen

• When you save a GIF, it automatically assumes an alpha channel.
• Resizing your canvas is simple: Edit/Resize Canvas… and enter your dimensions

Seashore

• No alpha channel when you save a GIF.
• Even when the background of your image is transparent.
• In fact I don’t see an option to save GIFs with an alpha channel at all. (!?)
• After some hunting and experimenting I discovered how to resize my canvas: Image/Image Boundaries…
• You can’t just set your dimensions, you have to tell it where to expand/contract.
• That’s more powerful, its great, but it doesn’t explain that or warn you if you just enter your dimensions and hit “Set”. Nothing happens at all.

My Opinion

Seashore is clearly a more stable and powerful application, Pixen is designed for pixel drawing and animation, that’s about it. The advantage to Pixen’s narrow mindset is that they made it intuitive to use and have sane defaults.

This is a lesson to me, and I must remember it. And the lesson is in simplicity and what we can learn from it.

Firefox vs Chrome

This is very zoomed in, because I’m working with pixels here.

Firefox PNG and Font Rendering

Chrome PNG and Font Rendering

My Opinion

Judgement call? Firefox beats the pants off of Chrome as far as repeating image rendering. It treats the entire element as a single image and dithers accordingly. That’s a fantastic way to do it. You can actually just barely see the dividing line between the top and bottom of the Firefox image, that’s because those are two different p-tags.

The font rendering is pretty similar, but again I have to give it to Firefox here. At huge scales, their fonts look cleaner.

At normal scales I can’t consciously tell the difference between the image nor font rendering. But still, I’d like to see those features implemented in Chrome.

I use both browsers regularly, and strongly prefer Chrome, but there’s still certainly things to be learned from other browsers.

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