User feedback

The UI refresh that just hit Chrome stable has dramatically reduced the size of the text in the URL box.  Capital letters are now merely 10 pixels tall.  From the top of the capitals to the lowest descender, it's now 13 pixels.  Since my DPI is 144, that's roughly a point size of 6.5, which I find very difficult to read.  It's also a much smaller target for selecting portions of a URL to copy or delete.

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I misspoke.  My DPI is 120, so the point size of the URL box text is about 7.8, which is still too small, especially with the reduced contrast and the thinner Roboto typeface.

@3: We shouldn't be using Roboto on Windows (we use the system UI font), nor have we reduced the contrast of the address bar text that I'm aware of.

Measuring the full font height (not just to the top of a Latin capital; we need to include height for diacritics and such), the height is 19 px.  The clickable region for selecting is even larger, since we explicitly extend that; it's nearly the entire visible height of the box (which is now larger than before).

While this is a slightly smaller font height than before, it matches e.g. Edge and Firefox and is larger than the fonts used in the tabs, in Windows Explorer, typical textareas, etc.  Given this, it still ought to be readable.

It's possible things don't look good at scale factors like 110% or 125%.  The majority of Chrome's high-DPI testing is at 200%, with some testing at 150%.  I would be willing to believe that at 125% we have some kind of unintentional glitchiness about how things are sized or positioned.  Feel free to provide screenshots of this (the one in comment 2 is not helpful because it's been zoomed/blurred in some way, but it looks vaguely correct offhand).

I just got updated to 54 today, and this problem has gone away.  In fact, all the text (UI and page content) is now thankfully larger.

When I opened the browser this morning, the Chrome frame window got much larger than when I closed it last night, and all text got noticeably larger.  I was able to notch my zoom down a level (most pages now at 110-125% instead of 125-150%) and now everything is wonderful.  So I consider this FIXED rather than WONTFIX.

> Measuring the full font height (not just to the top of a Latin capital; we need to include height for diacritics and such), the height is 19 px.

Yes, I understand how fonts are normally measured, but there was no way for me to figure out how many pixels the system was reserving for that height.  With 54, the text in the URL is 3 pixels taller than it was with 53 and now looks the same size and typeface as other Windows GUI.  The URL box is now taller, and the icons for the extensions are now stretched taller as well.

> The clickable region for selecting is even larger, since we explicitly extend that; it's nearly the entire visible height of the box (which is now larger than before).

That's the vertical dimension.  The characters were much narrower in 53, making it difficult to select a substring of a URL.

> While this is a slightly smaller font height than before, it matches e.g. Edge and Firefox and is larger than the fonts used in the tabs, in Windows Explorer, typical textareas, etc.

No, I opened other browsers for comparison, and the URL text was substantially smaller in Chrome 53 than it was in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

> It's possible things don't look good at scale factors like 110% or 125%.

But the zoom factor doesn't affect the text size of the URL text, so that should be irrelevant.  I provided that information to show that most text is already on the small side for me, so that this was a significant regression.

> (the one in comment 2 is not helpful because it's been zoomed/blurred in some way, but it looks vaguely correct offhand)

That screenshot might have been mangled since it was posted second-hand.  I've added a new one that shows the difference between 53 (too small) and 54 (correct).

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In 54, we re-enabled support for the 125% device scale factor, which was previously disabled due to bugs (and forced to draw at 100%).  Now if your display DPI is 125%, Chrome should be drawing its own UI (including the omnibox font) at 125% as well.  This hopefully also addresses the issue where we were smaller than Edge and Firefox, which were probably respecting the 125% factor while Chrome was not.

(Note that this and everything else I've talked about is distinct from the page zoom factor, which may be what you were mentioning as "zoom factor".)