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HD starts at 720p.

The difference between Netflix 1080 and 720p is often pretty small, so you might've really just not noticed. They're generally streaming with pretty poor bit-rates

The first time I watched a pirated episode after years of streaming from Netflix was pretty eye opening for me wrt video quality.

You’re definitely mistaken - you get up to 4K in the browser with Safari - it’s highlighted in the UI even I think.

It's great if it does, not sure how that makes me mistaken though. I never said anything about what was actually supported.

My point was that the pixel density is pretty hard to determine with low Bitrate streams as you get them from Netflix.

Safari on Mac OS can do 4k. Chrome will top out at 720p.

You can check for yourself, hit Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D during playback to show a bunch of stats on the stream, including the current resolution being shown.

Safari is up to 4k on macOS 11+, as per https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764