Steam UI Update Beta Drops IE Rendering For WebKit 244
Citing massive growth in their user base ("25 million users, 1000+ games, 12 billion player minutes per month, and 75 billion Steam client minutes per month"), Valve unveiled a revamped UI for Steam on Tuesday, opening the beta test to anyone who wants to try it out. There are many changes, and an increased focus on social features: "Right from within your own game Library, you can now track which of your friends plays each game or invite them to play one with you. Before you've even bought a game, knowing whether your friends play it is one of the most useful pieces of information to have. So on the store homepage, there's a new listing of what your friends have bought or played lately." Tracking games and achievements have both gotten simpler, and Valve has dropped the Internet Explorer rendering engine in favor of WebKit. An enterprising user also found files that may indicate the existence of an OS X Steam client.
Re:So (Score:3, Informative)
I downloaded the beta a few hours ago.
The first thing I noticed was, while the Supreme Commander 2 Demo was downloading, the UI kept locking up for ~120 seconds. (0% CPU)
The second thing I noticed was level load times dropped about 30% in TF2.
Browsing feels a whole lot quicker now - except during the freezes. :P
Re:I'm not quite sold. (Score:5, Informative)
You do know you can add shortcuts to non-steam games in Steam too? That way you also get the in-game browser and community features in it. You're the first person I've actually heard of using the Vista/Win7 game explorer though, if not using Steam it's much faster to write part of the game's name to start menu search box and launch it.
Re:Why OSX? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't want to be tracked (Score:5, Informative)
How does Steam let the whole world know if you're playing or not? Even if you use your usual nickname with Steam, set your profile status to private (it's friends only by default if I remember correctly) and don't add friends on it. No one knows you're playing then.
99% of games you can also buy on other media or download services than Steam (MW2 and a few other games being exceptions, since they use Steam).
Complaining about Steam's community and friends features is stupid because you don't need to use them if you don't want to.
Re:Why OSX? (Score:4, Informative)
Torchlight is one out of my head. Well, the Mac version isn't out yet, but it has been announced.
Re:I'm not quite sold. (Score:2, Informative)
Yah but then you don't get any icons for non-steam games, which are the majority of my games. Using vista game explorer editor I can have nice huge boxart for every single one of my games, even my old DOS ones I launch via dosbox (Wizard's Crown, Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, Romance of the 3 Kingdoms III, etc).
See this for an example, though I have my boxart much larger.
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_C0PrNGg_f9I/SooziquYCbI/AAAAAAAAEU4/iRLdJma4PkU/s800/VGE%20Complete.jpg [ggpht.com]
Download bar? About time (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If your friend jumped off a cliff would you do (Score:3, Informative)
If your friend jumped off a cliff would you do it?
No, but if my friend said they liked a game and historically liked similar games to me then it might make me buy it.
Re:I wonder how it works on Wine (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunatly, steam client is broken in Wine now http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19444 [winehq.org] , but it doesn't seem to be webkits fault!
Hopefully it might eventually wind up being working better than the old Steam client ever was now that the IE dependency is thrown out.
Fixes an interesting issue. (Score:5, Informative)
With this beta release of Steam, they fix an interesting issue that cropped up with the release of Windows 7.
For users of that particular OS who have either removed Internet Explorer, or did not have it installed at all when the OS was installed (see: Europe, and the rest of the world that couldn't even stand the browser), Steam was half-broken. One could not see any screenshots for a game before purchasing. Anything that needed a popup window in Steam would NOT default to the main browser installed on the system.
People complained about this, asking Steam to start looking for the default browser on the system so they could at least go back to browsing for games and possibly buying them.
It's good to see them actually address that issue.
Maybe I'll buy Space Giraffe to celebrate.
Re:Privacy options? (Score:3, Informative)
You just set your profile to private, it's that easy. Infact by default it's set on private mode, and you have to opt in for the community features. Even the JSON/XML pages for fetching various Steam stats aren't accessible by others when your account is set on private mode (Valve cites apparent legal reasons for this).
Re:Why OSX? (Score:1, Informative)
We're sorry, Steam has been rejected from the iTunes app store for duplicating iTunes functionality. If you would like to alter your app and resubmit, please feel free.
The iPhone and the Mac are not the same thing.
Re:Neat UI after Battle.Net changes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why OSX? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I wonder how it works on Wine (Score:1, Informative)
It works great if you configure wine up to pretend it's Windows 7.
TurboTax DOES have 1-click facebook export already (Score:5, Informative)
I just finished my taxes last week, and in one of the last steps after e-filing TurboTax offered to post a "I just finished my taxes with TurboTax and I'm getting a $XXX refund!" message to my Facebook profile.
Re:I don't want to be tracked (Score:3, Informative)
You can make your profile private which effectively opts you out of any social features. You can also disable in-game overlays but I find those handy whenever I want to pull up a web browser.
Re:Webkit (Score:2, Informative)
Maemo and Moblin both use mozilla based browsers. Maemo comes with MicroB and Moblin comes with the Moblin Browser. Both can also use Fennec or Firefox Mobile. There may be some WebKit projects floating around for both of them, but I don't believe any of them are far enough to replace the platform browser. My guess is that the merger into Meego will continue to use Mozilla/Firefox.
Re:So (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, apparently they only changed Steam itself, as the interface used in the games to access a browser is built in with the engine, so it'd require an update and more testing for each game that still uses IE individually. However, apparently you can turn off HTML MOTDs. (Google it)
Re:Webkit (Score:2, Informative)
Chromium uses WebKit as well.