Linux Users Upset By Chromium's Busted HiDPI Support

While Chromium is usually quick to advance technology-wise and the Chrome/Chromium developers tend to be caring toward Linux, the support for HiDPI displays with the web-browser on Linux appears to be in bad shape.

A Phoronix reader emailed me this week relaying his frustrations over using Google's web-browser on Linux with a HiDPI display. While HiDPI displays are becoming more common with laptops ranging from the Apple Retina MacBook Pro to various PC laptops/ultrabooks like some ASUS Zenbook models and various ThinkPads, Google engineers seem to be unwilling to improve the Linux support in a timely manner while the HiDPI support on other platforms is in better shape.

The Phoronix reader alerting me to the Chromium HiDPI issues pointed out this open bug report dating back to last August. The original reporter mentioned that with HiDPI support enabled in Chrome, drop-down menus and context menus would be unusuable as they'd appear on other parts of the screen and would appear squished or otherwise distorted.

Since that bug report was opened, other Linux users have also reported Chromium HiDPI issues on a range of distributions from Ubuntu to Arch. There's also been other bug reports opened about the same issue that were then closed as duplicates of this mentioned bug. An Intel developer even said, "It's unusable on my MacBook Pro with Retina Display running Fedora 21." Along the way, the HiDPI flag was removed from the Linux build and other updates done to Chromium that for some users make the situation worse. It's also worth mentioning that the Chromium-powered Opera browser on Linux doesn't run into these HiDPI issues.

There's many Linux users confirming HiDPI problems with Chrome/Chromium Linux builds and there's now over 50 comments on this bug report, yet it remains an "unconfirmed" bug at the time of writing.