Q:

Are modern browsers good at scaling images down nowadays?

Back in the old days, one would always need to scale images in Photoshop, because the browsers did a terrible job of it. Firefox now seems to scale images smaller quite nicely. Do the other browsers do a nice job too?

A:

Internet Explorer 7 doesn't do so well, but IE8 does. You can change IE7 to use the better method from IE8 with a simple line of CSS.
img { -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; }

P.S. I found this out when working on an intranet page where bandwidth wasn't a problem. For something on the internet I would seriously consider resizing the image to reduce the number of bytes.

