Increase the size of address bar and tabs bar in Google Chrome: screen res. 1920×1080, 15" LCD screen

Question

System: Ubuntu 18.10 with screen resolution 1920 × 1080 (16:9) on a 15" LCD screen.

My address bar and tabs bar of Google Chrome (Version 71.0.3578.98 (Official Build) (64-bit) with GTK+ theme) look small to me. I want to increase the size of them; not just the font but overall size.

Zooming in from the chrome menu does not change their size but changes the size of web pages.

How can I increase the overall size of the address bar and tabs bar along with the options in the chrome menu, window icons and other icons in it? I also do not want to scale all the applications, just the chrome bars.

Can we create some kind of UserChrome.css file for Google Chrome like Firefox to tweak the appearances?

Screenshot:

Solution 1

I had the same problem and got it fixed from Ubuntu setting. Setting -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Large text (by default its off, turn it on)

Solution 2

@Apoorv Pontis answer does scale fonts, but at best it's a hack. It is equivalent to lowering your display resolution by the same factor (although it allows more finer increments).

Using a 4k display (3840px wide) and starting with font scale of 1.0. Go into Chrome developer tools and select the element of the page. It will measure 3840px wide. Now using Gnome tweaks, change font scaling to 2.0. Again use Chrome developer tools and select the element. You will see it is now about 1920px wide with some round off error in scaling.

This not only scales the fonts but the entire content of the browser by a factor of 2.0. Using other things, you will see you effectively downgraded your 4K display to HD 1920 x 1080 for your entire desktop.

From what I have seen from Arch Linux wiki, looks like this uses something similar to what xrandr does.

For everything, but Chrome its better to adjust font sizes than using this font scaling feature. If you use a shell theme, you can also adjust font size of the shell font for the top bar. Do that by editing the appropriate .CSS file for the theme.

It appears the only way to fix Chromes address bar is to dig into the source code. Everything else obeys font size but that. It appears to be fixed tiny for some reason.

Solution 3

As suggested by user DK Bose in the comments, this question gave me the correct solution. But in Ubuntu 18.10, the scaling factor can be found/changed by installing Gnome Tweaks and then navigating to the 'Fonts' tab.

Comments

[DK Bose]

See if superuser.com/questions/1116767/… helps

[Apoorv Potnis]

@DKBose That really worked for me. Can you write this as an answer so that I could accept it? Also, in Ubuntu 18.10, the scaling factor can be found through Gnome Tweaks --> Fonts.

[DK Bose]

Glad to be of help! But I request you to post the answer detailing, with nice images, what things were like before you fixed things, and how they look now and what exactly you did to solve the problem. As you know, I don't have the same screen resolution as you do, and so my trying to answer would be more hypothetical. Plus, I use KDE, not GNOME.

[Alex Punnen]

same problem with LinuxMint; Driving me crazy