July 07, 2012
Fixing the Retina Chrome Canary Flash FullScreen Issue
Written by
David Kennedy
Penetration Testing
Security Testing & Analysis
If you jumped on the bandwagon and bought the shiny new macbook pro retina display from Apple, a number of applications are just starting to support the resolution pushed through by the video card. There are a number of applications that are experiencing issues with rendering fullscreen, crisp text, and other issues (including kernel panics). If you're a user of Google Chrome, in order to get support for the retina display you have to use the experimental Google Chrome Canary download build.
If you haven't downloaded Google Canary yet, head over to the link here which will look similar to the screenshot below.
If you view anything fullscreen in Flash (such as youtube) you will run into a fullscreen issue where it will only display on a portion of your screen and not go into full screen mode. This is primarily due to the incompatibility with fullscreen with retina and the built in flash player that Chrome uses for rendering. After some research and debugging, we were able to figure out the issue in the built in ppapi-flash plugin. In order to fix this, you need to disable the integrated ppapi-flash pack thats built into Chrome. In OSX, go to a terminal and type the following (note the box below scrolls to the right to see more command line text):
cd Desktop
nano Chrome.command
/Applications/Google Chrome Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome Canary --disable-bundled-ppapi-flash --user-datadir=/Users/$USER/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome Canary/ 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null &
Hit Control-X and hit Y to save.
Next type chmod 777 Chrome.command
Double click the Chrome.command to launch Chrome.
You are all set! You will be able to view fullscreen flash within Chrome Canary until this issue is fixed.