You can use down-stepping to achieve better results. Most browsers seem to use linear interpolation rather than bi-cubic when resizing images.
(Update There has been added a quality property to the specs, imageSmoothingQuality
which is currently available in Chrome only.)
Unless one chooses no smoothing or nearest neighbor the browser will always interpolate the image after down-scaling it as this function as a low-pass filter to avoid aliasing.
Bi-linear uses 2×2 pixels to do the interpolation while bi-cubic uses 4×4 so by doing it in steps you can get close to bi-cubic result while using bi-linear interpolation as seen in the resulting images.
var canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");
var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
var img = new Image();
img.onload = function () {
// set size proportional to image
canvas.height = canvas.width * (img.height / img.width);
// step 1 - resize to 50%
var oc = document.createElement('canvas'),
octx = oc.getContext('2d');
oc.width = img.width * 0.5;
oc.height = img.height * 0.5;
octx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, oc.width, oc.height);
// step 2
octx.drawImage(oc, 0, 0, oc.width * 0.5, oc.height * 0.5);
// step 3, resize to final size
ctx.drawImage(oc, 0, 0, oc.width * 0.5, oc.height * 0.5,
0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
}
img.src = "https://i.imgur.com/SHo6Fub.jpg";
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/SHo6Fub.jpg" width="300" height="234">
<canvas id="canvas" width=300></canvas>
Depending on how drastic your resize is you can might skip step 2 if the difference is less.
In the demo you can see the new result is now much similar to the image element.