user interface - How to adjust UI scaling for Chrome?

For some reason when I opened chrome this morning I noticed that the entire UI has been scaled up slightly. Everything (buttons, text, webpages, etc.) is about ~10% larger than it used to be. This is really annoying since now less fits on my screen (particularly now my bookmarks bar doesn't fit as many bookmarks).

I can't find any kind of UI DPI scaling option in the settings. How can I change it back to what it used to be?

---

Notes:

• This isn't a problem in the Windows DPI scaling settings since this didn't happen with any other programs.


• I know how to zoom in and out of webpages, but that's definitely not the problem as the entire UI is scaled up, not just the webpage.

Answer

With the Chrome 54 update they made it so Chrome can detect the DPI setting on your computer so that the web browser will be scaled accordingly.

Google Chrome didn’t used to pay attention to your Windows DPI setting. Now it does, and that’s the root cause of the large interface issue.

If you have the DPI scaling set to 125% or greater on your Windows computer, then the Chrome browser will scale differently depending on that setting.

Option #1

Have Windows specifically tell the Chrome program not to do DPI scaling by:

Right-click the Chrome icon > Properties > Compatibility > and CHECK "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings"

Option #2 (Seems to be most successful)

The obvious fix is to just set your computer’s DPI scaling back to 100%. That will make Chrome appear how it used to but everything else will be smaller, so it’s not a very good fix.

Just type “dpi” into your Windows search bar and open the top result, “Make text and other items appear larger and smaller” (at least that’s how it is on Windows 7).

Option #3

Right-click on the Google Chrome shortcut or start menu icon and select >properties > shortcut tab

Enter the following code at the end of the text in the Target field:

/high-dpi-support=1 /force-device-scale-factor=1

Make sure there’s a blank space between the .exe” part and the first forward slash.

Hit Apply and then restart Chrome.

If the scaling isn’t back to normal, make sure to launch Chrome from the location specified above. If Chrome is on your taskbar, don't forget to unpin Chrome and repin it. This isn't a permanent fix anyway because other links to Chrome (like hyperlinks in PDFs) can trigger the larger UI as well.