Some atom labels look gray/dull on Chromebook

[vperezcadavid99]

Test device
Chromebook

Operating System
ChromeOS

Browser
Chrome

Problem description
From phetsims/qa#1364
In the Real Molecule screen, some atom labels appear gray, making them look a bit drab compared to those on other devices.

Visuals
Win11:

Chromebook:

Details

Troubleshooting information: !!!!! DO NOT EDIT !!!!! Name: ‪Molecule Polarity‬ URL: https://phet-dev.colorado.edu/html/molecule-polarity/2.0.0-dev.3/phet/molecule-polarity_all_phet.html Version: 2.0.0-dev.3 2026-03-11 19:37:39 UTC Features missing: applicationcache, applicationcache, touch Flags: pixelRatioScaling User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Language: en-US Window: 1440x731 Pixel Ratio: 2/1 WebGL: WebGL 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 Chromium) GLSL: WebGL GLSL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0 Chromium) Vendor: WebKit (WebKit WebGL) Vertex: attribs: 16 varying: 30 uniform: 4096 Texture: size: 16384 imageUnits: 16 (vertex: 16, combined: 32) Max viewport: 32767x32767 OES_texture_float: true Dependencies JSON: {}

[Nancy-Salpepi]

Thanks @vperezcadavid99. I'm not sure anything can be done about this. @jonathanolson @AgustinVallejo any thoughts here?

[Nancy-Salpepi]

Perhaps we can reduce the amount of shading on the atoms to help with contrast?

[jonathanolson]

Just saw this (deep in the maintenance release stuff). Sorry!

That looks like it is "gray/dull" because it's blurry. Overall something looks in general off about the resolution, but especially on the labels. Seems like something good to investigate (perhaps pixel ratio is misdetected, or something is causing the NodeTexture to pick the wrong scale/resolution).

[vperezcadavid99]

It seems that during the dev lite test, atom labels had a better resolution and didn't look too gray compared with the Dev test.
When it comes to the atom's color, it's mainly the same, but labels are slightly different in both dev versions.
Look at the labels in the video.

IMG_5616.mov

[Nancy-Salpepi]

@AgustinVallejo I don't think we should spend time trying to optimize things for Chromebook. I think we should defer and move forward. What do you think?

[AgustinVallejo]

Agree, deferring but leaving open in case @jonathanolson has some time in the upcoming iterations. I don't think this should block publication.