If you read our initial analysis of the MacBook Pro's new Retina Display you will know that application support is necessary to get the most out of the display. The situation is really quite similar to Retina Display enabled apps for the iPhone and iPad. Generally speaking app developers will need to supply higher resolution assets for use on Retina enabled Macs. All of Apple's existing rendering and display APIs already have support for the Retina Display, however those applications that have their own custom renderers may need updating.

In the case of Google Chrome, the browser uses Apple's text display API but renders to an offscreen canvas before scaling the text and displaying it on a web page. The offscreen render procedure is not Retina aware, and thus you get the nasty result you see above (the image on the left is what you get with Google Chrome, the image on the right is from Safari). 

Thankfully the problem is non-existent in Google's Chrome Canary (screenshot below), a developmental build of Chrome that forgoes a lot of validation testing. Canary is useful for quickly getting feedback on new features without any concern about breaking stuff. 

From left to right we have Google Chrome, Chrome Canary and Safari. Google still renders text differently from Safari but it's no longer ugly.