The next major Chrome release will auto-detect which Linux display server its Ozone backend should use, a change that will resolve blurry UI issues for users running the browser on Wayland with fractional scaling enabled.

Ozone is the abstraction layer Chromium (which underpins Chrome) uses for graphics and input handling. It handles how the browser communicates and interfaces with the underlying display server on Linux desktops, be it X11 or, more commonly these days, Wayland.

Currently, Chrome, and most Chromium-based browsers (and Electron) default to running Ozone with X11, even under Wayland. This is why if you have fractional scaling enabled in Wayland, Chrome (and related browsers/apps) often look blurry – it’s interpolation blur1.

But there is a setting which allows Ozone to detect which backend to use. For a conveyor belt of technical and compatibility reasons that setting is currently set to use X11, and has been since its proposal in 2016.

But year by year, those reasons been resolved, remedied, or otherwise rendered moot.

This is set to ‘default’ by, er, default – but ‘default’ uses ‘X11’ atm

When set to “auto” this will, as the Ozone documentation layouts, use “Wayland if possible, X11 otherwise”.

Per a recent commit (spotted by Phoronix), the --ozone-platform-hint setting has been flipped to ‘auto’ by default2 for the upcoming Chrome 140 release. This will mean Ozone, the graphics and input handling layer, decides which backend it uses.

Comparison in Ozone hints (note: this image is compressed)

Wayland Ozone should also mean browser input events (i.e., mouse clicks and keyboard presses) are handled more quickly than on X, boosting responsiveness (whether perceptible to the end user will depend on the task, but in theory… It will be better).

Chrome plans to ship the –ozone-platform-hint=auto setting by default in the Chrome 140 release, which is due for stable release in August 2025. Nightly, developer and beta builds may or may not have this change enabled already.

Enable Ozone Platform Setting

You don’t need to download an unstable build to see if setting the Ozone preferred platform setting to favour Wayland makes a difference for you. All modern versions of Chrome (and most Chromium-based browsers, including Vivaldi) include the flag.

Try try it out:

  • Go to chrome://flags (or similar) in a new tab
  • Locate the ozone-platform-hint flag
  • Set auto in the dropdown menu
  • Quit the browser (rather than relaunch)

I should point out that some Chromium-based browsers already enable this, and some distro packagers of Chromium enable it also. You may already be benefitting from this and not noticing. In which case, this change won’t affect you.

Otherwise, try it out – but keep in mind that Google was cautious in enabling ‘auto’ by default for all due to bugs, quirks and incompatibilities which have occurred when it it enabled — issues that are ironed out in Chrome 140+ builds, but may be present in earlier build.

I’ve used the ‘auto’ hint for years and seen no major drawbacks or performance issues, but keep the above in mind if you decide to test it out for yourself.

  1. AIUI X11 (via XWayland) renders the UI and text at integer scaling, and Wayland then rescales it to the fractional value, e.g., 125%, which is how that creeps in. ↩︎
  2. Rather, ‘default’ becomes ‘auto’, rather than presently where ‘default’ is (usually ‘X11’. In both cases the UI shows ‘default’ as the default setting. If you understand that, have a cookie. ↩︎