Google Chrome/Chromium Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Chrome/Chromium Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support

On top of today seeing the KDE XWaylandVideoBridge announcement, the debut of GNOME 44 with its many Wayland improvements, and XWayland 23.1 being released with multiple new features/improvements, there is more good news for Wayland fans. Google has merged to the Chrome/Chromium Ozone code support for Wayland fractional scaling via the fractional-scale-v1 protocol...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-fractional-scale-v1

[Zeioth]

I assume --force-device-scale-factor=2 still doesn't work correctly?

[ernstp]

Did support for this make it into Gnome 44?!

[bple2137]

Did support for this make it into Gnome 44?!

Yes, though it's only support in Mutter so that clients could utilize the protocol. Don't confuse that with fractional-scale-v1 support in the GNOME UI itself as for GTK4 they straight up refused implementing it as it'll break backwards compatibility. Maybe that's why they kicked off GTK5 planning already.

As for Chrome adding it, let me guess - the Ozone layer and Wayland support is still opt in and needs to be enabled by user as experimental feature, right? To this day I don't get why this makes sense to anyone. It's the few flags that everyone enables anyway and Wayland backend is pretty much ready for daily use by most users across all compositors (from my testing, let me know if there's something broken)

Come on Firefox, it's your turn now (and actually I thought it'll come sooner than this).

[mangeek]

I believe most Ubuntu Chromium users won't see the benefits of this until the snaps are built against core bases that have newer packages between Wayland Protocols and the Chromium dependencies.

[curfew]

I assume --force-device-scale-factor=2 still doesn't work correctly?

I haven't needed this hack for ages. I've been using the Ozone platform on Wayland natively and scaling has just worked automatically for a long time.

[bearoso]

I believe most Ubuntu Chromium users won't see the benefits of this until the snaps are built against core bases that have newer packages between Wayland Protocols and the Chromium dependencies.

No, being just a protocol, no updated libraries are necessary, the interface is added directly to Chromium. As long as you have the new Chromium and a compositor that supports it, you get the feature.

The Wayland protocol package is literally just a bunch of specification xml files used to generate source files. There's not a lot of actual substance to "Wayland" itself, it's all interface.

[Zeioth]

I haven't needed this hack for ages. I've been using the Ozone platform on Wayland natively and scaling has just worked automatically for a long time.

What DE? I'm on Sway and running

google-chrome-stable -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland

Chrome doesn't scale at all.

[ehansin]

What DE? I'm on Sway and running

google-chrome-stable -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland

Chrome doesn't scale at all.

This one vexed me for a while, finally found the current solution (someone correct me if I am wrong.) I am using Chromium, but assume should work on Chrome:

* In a new tab, go to "chrome://flags" (enter this as the URL.)
* Change "Preferred Ozone platform" from Default to either Auto or Wayland (Auto works for me fine, detects I am running Wayland.)

So far no issues, scales to the scaling set in the DE or window manager, without the blurriness that comes from it running on top of XWayland.

[archerallstars]

What DE? I'm on Sway and running

google-chrome-stable -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland

Chrome doesn't scale at all.

I am running on GNOME. Chrome has scaled correctly since age ago with this flag.