How to make Google Chrome honor my Windows DPI setting?

Question

Google Chrome doesn't seem to respect my DPI setting in Windows. I run at 150 DPI, but Chrome ignores that, meaning that images and text are teeeeeeny tiny.

I hit:

• Ctrl + +
• Ctrl + +

to zoom in. Unfortunately every new tab, or new window, defaults to the 100% teeny tiny zoom level.

Update: It's also important to note that you cannot click buttons in flash (e.g. YouTube videos), because Chrome mis-handles mouse coordinates. (Fixed 6.0.472.55)

Is it possible for either:

• Chrome to respect my Windows dpi setting?
• Chrome to remember my zoom preference?

Checked version: 4.1.249.1045

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Half fixed

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While Chome still doesn't honor the Windows DPI setting, it does now remember your zoom level.

Version: 5.0.375.55

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Five-Eighths Fixed

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While Chrome still doesn't honor the Windows DPI setting, it does now offer a default "page zoom" option:

Unfortunately there is no zoom level that matches my current DPI setting: 136% (131dpi).

Version: 10.0.648.133

Zoom flag

I tried scoducks' suggestion of the new hidden dpi flag. It's truly awful. It seems to cause Chrome to simply re-scale the final rendered Window; causing text to become blurry (rather than sharper):

Solution 1

It's a known bug with Chromium, the program on which Chrome was built upon.

Be sure to star it!

Update: More up-to-date related bug report: Enable high-DPI support in Vista, Win7 and Win8

Solution 2

I had this question and found this answer that was posted somewhere else. Go to: chrome://flags/#high-dpi-support

It is not perfect because it isn't fully supported yet, but it is exactly what you were looking for, it fixed the problem for me. A few buttons are mis-sized, but it is much better.

Solution 3

Update: 9/5/2014

Chrome 37 now supports high-dpi!

For example:

• the bookmark bar icons are scaled
• the bookmark bar text is scaled
• the address bar text is scaled
• the tab icon and text is scaled
• extension icons are scaled
• the customize icon is scaled

Now Chrome just needs to improve its rendering speed so it's as fast as IE.

But this is a great day!

Solution 4

With Chrome 44.0.2403.9 dev-m (64-bit) I have a problem where only a few website are rendered extremely small. What is working for me is to use the Chrome DevTools to emulate a different device.

• ctrl + shift + i to open the Chrome DevTools
• ctrl + shift + m to toggle device mode on, if it isn't already on
• In the device drop menu at the top left of the screen, select a mobile device, e.g. a tablet with a large display resolution like the Nexus 10
• ctrl + shift + i to close the Chrome DevTools

This causes the page to be rendered normally for me, but you may need to select one of the laptop devices, after selecting one of the mobile devices, to get the page to render correctly for you.

View more solutions

Comments

[Ian Boyd]

How is A different from B? i mean, from an implementation point of view, you wouldn't notice any difference. And as a web-designer, both are equivalent. And while ie does "zoom", it doesn't "zoom". It doesn't "blow everything up". If it did then text would get fuzzy. It doesn't. ie rescales everything as appropriate. On the other hand i'm getting really tired of Chrome's poor high-dpi support. As soon as ie9, and it's fast rendering speed is released, i'm sooo switching back.

[Ian Boyd]

Also, it would be a poor decision to call it 96dpi, rather than 100%. Nobody know, cares, or show have to know, or have to care, what a dpi is, and why there's 96 of them. Windows itself, when setting dpi, doesn't even call it dpi. They use percentage larger, e.g. 125%

[Always Learning Forever]

We could call the resolution on monitors as VGA, WXGA, WUXGA etc instead of 640x480, 1280x768 or 1920x1200. We could put parking, slow, fast, very fast and too fast on the speedometer. We could dumb down anything and call it game. Just like they have in Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer; they set the latency as bars, and no way to tell how much one bar represents. It was discovered that they were way too high range, and many people edited the config files so one bar would mean 25ms. And then they found out most people had more then 100ms latency any time, to any host.

[Always Learning Forever]

It would require a learning curve by displaying the latency in ms instead of bars, but then again it would scale nicely into the future, when internet connections become faster.

[Always Learning Forever]

The same applies to DPI. It is necessary to know if you wanto be accurate in what you design or write, and it would scale well in the future, and it would provide an accurate reference point from general text and design scaling. The web pages should be able to scale and look good in most desktop and laptop resolutions and DPI situations.

[Always Learning Forever]

About the scaling and zooming. what IE and opera and now chrome do is render the text and tables/css layout at a higher resolution, and zoom in the images. If the images would be natively at a higher resolution, say 200x200, and the web page at a good reference point 96DPI would specify the image at 100x100 (this can be done in the <img> tag), then the image would look nice and sharp at any dpi setting from 96 up to 192, given the browser does proper bicubic interpolation and the image does not containg very sharp details.

[Always Learning Forever]

Windows do use DPI as a value when you set Custom DPI size. I wish they would use the DPI value at the other screen too.

[Ian Boyd]

omfg. i've been watching the thread, getting e-mail notifications where there's a new response. A developer locked the thread 5 minutes ago - saying he doesn't really understand the issue. facepalm

[Ian Boyd]

The problem is that when presenting a 96x96 pixel image to the user Chrome will render the image 96 pixels wide by 96 pixels high on the monitor. That assumed 1:1 mapping between pixels in the computer and pixels on the monitor is incorrect.

[Ian Boyd]

Text is horribly blurry. Looks like they're simply applying the blunt hammer of scaling the final composited window image - rather than actually supporting high-dpi. Hopefully it's a work in progress; maybe in 7 years Chrome will be where IE was 7 years ago.

[Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007]

More up-to-date related bug report: code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=149881

[Fran Marzoa]

And many themes are broken...

[DavidPostill]

Then don't use the dev release, use the latest stable release instead (43.0.2357)

[WhiteKnight]

@DavidPostill This wasn't a complaint, but rather a possible solution for the other people experiencing the same problem. This problem has existed for years and still exists in current versions of the Chrome browser, which I was highlighting by posting my version number and can also be seen by recent posts in the bug listed in the post current marked as the answer.

[WhiteKnight]

@DavidPostill A few examples are Reddit, 500px and Google Drive, but other smaller websites have the same problem. I've reported these sites to Google.

[David Balažic]

Also see bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=410696 For me is still does not work (v53), I have set DPI to 125%, but Chrome show pages smaller than FF or IE. (fun fact: Windows supported DPI scaling since at least XP, that is year 2002)