Chrome Canary Fixes Rendering Issue with Retina MacBook Pro
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 12, 2012 5:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- MacBook Pro
- Chrome
If you read our initial analysis of the MacBook Pro's new Retina Display you will know that application support is necessary to get the most out of the display. The situation is really quite similar to Retina Display enabled apps for the iPhone and iPad. Generally speaking app developers will need to supply higher resolution assets for use on Retina enabled Macs. All of Apple's existing rendering and display APIs already have support for the Retina Display, however those applications that have their own custom renderers may need updating.
In the case of Google Chrome, the browser uses Apple's text display API but renders to an offscreen canvas before scaling the text and displaying it on a web page. The offscreen render procedure is not Retina aware, and thus you get the nasty result you see above (the image on the left is what you get with Google Chrome, the image on the right is from Safari).
Thankfully the problem is non-existent in Google's Chrome Canary (screenshot below), a developmental build of Chrome that forgoes a lot of validation testing. Canary is useful for quickly getting feedback on new features without any concern about breaking stuff.
From left to right we have Google Chrome, Chrome Canary and Safari. Google still renders text differently from Safari but it's no longer ugly.
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enkay18 - Tuesday, June 12, 2012 - link
Awesome Anand, thanks for the great up to the minute review on the retina mac.I run Windows 7 on Parallels Desktop and Bootcamp on my macbook pro, it'll be interesting to see how Retina display is handled by windows 7 under bootcamp or VM. I know you must be already testing that.. :-)
MadMan007 - Tuesday, June 12, 2012 - link
So glad you posted this, because there wasn't enough 'news' about Apple stuff lately!Devo2007 - Tuesday, June 12, 2012 - link
Nobody made you click the link. This is worthwhile news to those who read the original article.(Wait, why am I responding to a troll again?)
tim851 - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
The really funny thing is that by clicking to complain, he contributed to this article's pageviews and all AnandTech sees is "post Apple stuff, get more pageviews".Origin64 - Thursday, June 14, 2012 - link
Feedest notte yon trolles!name99 - Tuesday, June 12, 2012 - link
How strange --- that during WWDC, Apple's single largest interaction with the public, there would be more news about Apple than usual. Anand is clearly biased.I look forward to AnandTech NOT providing extra Intel info during Intel Developer Forums, or about Google during IO. And, god forbid we see a whole lot about MS on this site once Win8 launches.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
There were quite a few devices announced a week ago from many oems yet we only had an article for the Acer device.... Bit odd really!B3an - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
There was more Win 8 devices in the "pipeline" area. Would have liked to have seen more stuff though and Apple still got more pipeline coverage than all these OEM's combined. I dont want this site turning in to yet another tech site with way too much crap dedicated to Apple. If i want that i'll go to Engadget or The Verge.KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
Why not report on Apple? They push the industry forward in terms of portables, displays, and interfaces. Even if you hate Apple you should at least pay attention since this stuff will be showing up everywhere else in a couple years.adfrost - Tuesday, June 12, 2012 - link
This "offscreen render" might explain why pinch-to-zoom sucks so hard in Chrome full screen vs Safari full screen. Why not just stick with Apple's API? I mean, text is text. It's like going from TrueType fonts to the bad old days of bitmap fonts.