How to fix bluriness of Chrome in Windows 8.1 Preview and keep it usable on a high DPI touchscreen

Update: This functionality is built-in to the 64-bit version of Chrome Dev and Canary channels. You can download it here: http://blog.chromium.org/2014/06/try-out-new-64-bit-windows-canary-and.html

Windows 8.1 Preview introduces automatic scaling for desktop, however, if desktop apps are not designed to take advantage of this feature, they may be blurry until they are updated. One of the desktop apps that suffers from this is Chrome. Here is how to workaround this issue:

First, right click on Chrome shortcut in the taskbar and go to Properties.

Under Compatibility, check “Disable display scaling on High DPI settings”.

After applying the settings, it will remove blurriness, however, UI elements will be tiny and quite unusable on a high DPI touchscreen, such as Surface Pro. To fix this, type in “chrome://flags” in the address bar and enable “Touch Optimized UI” setting and restart Chrome.

You might also want to increase the default zoom level to 125-150% or higher, depending on your screen resolution and eyes, under Settings (Advanced) > Web Content > Page Zoom.

In chrome://flags you can also enable “HiDPI support” to get UI elements scale automatically, however, this works somewhat buggy, you might see some artifacts or some elements may appear slightly out of place.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or comments about the article in the comments section.