Display problem on HD+ display

[Ritergeek]

I just updated Flash Player on my Lenovo Yoga 2+ Pro laptop. This machine has a 3200 x 1800 pixel display, and I had to use the screen magnifier at 300% to read the options window that appears at the beginning of the update installation. The screenshot below shows the problem. Since screenshots viewed on standard resolution displays show the image about four times larger than the problem one, I included text from the webpage for comparison. The problem text measures under .5 mm high. That's about 1 or 2 pts in print.

I've been advised by Lenovo that this is not a hardware issue, nor is it a driver issue. Unfair as it seems, it's up to software vendors to stay current. Santa is going to have lots of these HD+ bad boy displays in his bag. Adobe, please help us out.

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

That's no good.  Thanks for the head's up.

I've filed the following bug on your behalf:

Bug#3909884 - Installation Dialog is Tiny on Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro HD+ (3200 x 1800) display

[Ritergeek]

Thank you Jeromie! I suppose things like this are the price we pay for being early adopters,but I didn't realize I was THAT early or that lowering screen res wouldn't help.

BTW, I'm running Windows 8.1 for whatever that may be worth.

[jeromiec83223024]

We worked really closely with Microsoft to optimize the experience for Internet Explorer on Win8+, and the Google Chrome experience is also really good.  We had to do a bunch of scaling work to support high-DPI displays. 

Both Microsoft and Google invested heavily in modernizing their plug-in APIs so that we can efficiently offer security-in-depth mechanisms to protect against the modern generation of malware, and instead had to retrofit a sandboxing approach to the Netscape Plug-In API (NPAPI), which has largely remained unchanged since the '90s. 

Since neither Chrome or IE have an installer (Flash Player is a built-in component of both, so there's nothing to download or update beyond the browser, which is managed through the Chrome Updater and Windows Update respectively), we overlooked the scaling considerations for NPAPI installer dialogs on high-DPI displays.  The folks that test the installers aren't typically the folks that test the latest engineering efforts around compatibility on cutting-edge hardware, and it probably looks fine in a Win8.1 VMWare image running on a 1280x1024 display.

Anyway, it shouldn't be too difficult to fix, but I think you're going to find pretty quickly that Chrome is generally going to be a better experience on Win8.1.

[Ritergeek]

Thank you for that explanation. I appreciate the efforts to support Firefox in spite of the situation you describe. Chrome does have many advantages, but Firefox works better for some functions I use daily, like downloading Facebook images for enhanced viewing without saving them.