14 DAY TRIAL // High DPI screens are beginning to show in an increasing number of devices, and developers need to adjust their applications to support it. The Chromium developers have just added this feature for the Linux platform.
It's not clear whether the Chromium for Windows and Mac OS already had this feature implemented, but it's very likely. In any case, Linux users should also benefit from it, finally, although it will be a while until it hits the stable branch of Google Chrome, which is used by most people.
This particular feature might not seem like much, but a large number of Linux devs have already implemented it or are working to do so. GNOME, for example, had High DPI support for some time, as well as GTK+. On the other hand, elementary OS is still working on full support. One thing is sure, small screens with insane resolutions are here and they are not going anywhere.
Google is not making a big deal out if this
Surprisingly, the information was shared only on Google+, and some users have noticed a post from François Beaufort, a Google employee. This is a big deal, and it should get more attention, but Linux is not taking a large share of the market pie.
"I'm happy to notice that High DPI is now fully supported in Chromium for Linux starting in Dev Channel. If you don't have a HighDPI screen, you can still run chromium with the --force-device-scale-factor=2 switch to see how scaling works there," wrote François Beaufort.
The Linux bug on Chromium is opened since August, 2012, so it took developers three years to fix this issue, but it's better late than never. We should see this fix land in Google Chrome in the next few months. In the meantime, if you have a High DPI monitor, you can do the same thing users have been doing, squint.