14 DAY TRIAL // One of the stars of Apple's WWDC 2012 was the Retina display MacBook Pro. It wasn't a big surprise, both literally and figuratively, since the new 15" model replaces the older 17" while also being smaller than current 15" MacBook Pros and since everyone knew Apple was working on a Retina display notebook/desktop for quite a while.
Even so, there's not a lot of software that takes advantage of the new huge resolution the device sports, 2880x1800 pixels, apart from the built-in one.
It's even worse on the web the vast majority of websites are not designed to be viewed at this resolution and neither are most browsers.
In fact, for the time being, using Safari is the only way to avoid pixelated graphic and ugly fonts. But that will soon change, Google is already working on a "retina-enabled" Chrome.
In fact, Google is already offering Chrome builds with retina display support. The very latest Chrome 21, in either Chromium daily builds form or as a Canary Build, sports a high-res UI and some crisp looking fonts.
The build should be landing in the dev channel soon. It's still going to be a couple of months until Chrome 21 lands in the stable channel, but it's on its way.
But that's just part of the equation, while the browsers are getting ready for the high-resolution future, the web is not. Few sites sport updated graphics to take advantage of the extra pixels on the new MacBook Pro or even in the new iPad.
Apple's sites serve better images for these devices, but that's a given. Google also has some upgraded graphics on the iPad, the logo image is much larger for example, but it doesn't use them on the MacBook. Other than that though, the web is optimized for much, much smaller resolutions.
It's no surprise either, while relatively large 22" displays sporting a native HD resolution, 1920x1080, most people are still using smaller monitors. In fact, the average resolution on the web just got a huge upgrade when 1024x768 was overtaken by 1366x768 to become the most popular resolution used online.
One way to prepare for bigger resolutions is to sport a dynamic design, one that adapts to the screen size, very useful now that mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular. Google is a big proponent of this, Google Search, Gmail, Google+, they all use a dynamic design.
Still, it's going to take years before the web is ready for large resolutions, luckily, it's going to take years for most people to upgrade to this type of displays too.