Valve's Steam Ditches Internet Explorer for WebKit
A new Steam is on the way. Try the beta today!
User interface overhauls isn't anything new. After all, Facebook users should be accustomed to a ridiculous amount of change. Now it's Valve's turn to give Steam a fresh coat of paint.
An opt-in beta today went live for all Steam users who wish to participate in checking out the new-look Steam.
"We made hundreds of changes to the Steam client as a result of customer feedback on the interface, performance, and functionality," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development at Valve.
The folks at Valve also saw fit to change the rendering engine for the UI, ditching Microsoft for an open source solution.
"We swapped out the Internet Explorer rendering engine with WebKit, which gives us a bunch of size, stability and performance benefits," explained Cook. "This release of Steam leaves us well prepared for another year of strong growth."
Major features:
- Complete overhaul of Steam client UI design to improve discoverability of features and to better expose all the information related to games in your library
- Complete overhaul of in-game overlay UI design to create a richer in-game experience exposing context sensitive information related to the game you are currently playing
- New game details view, presenting a detailed view of all the information for a single game in your library
- New grid view, presenting a graphical view of your game library
- New news page in the store/client/overlay which aggregates from Valve related news sites, official community groups, and third-party gaming news feeds
- New downloads view in the client, making it easier to track your progress downloading new games or game updates
- New Steam store design, including more integrated community features, improved recommendations, and improved video and screenshots viewing (and much more!)
Click here for more details and to opt-in to the beta if you're a Steam user.
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Love it. Trully amasing.
Yes! Much better, finaly they have done away with IE.
sounds great - im hearing rumors that some cases are getting deleted game data after the upgrade and having to re download games? is this still the case?
Sounds good, but quite a sketchy beta - back up first people!
Does this mean I can finally get rid of IE completely? or is there something else probably hiding and using it? Media Player?
dont think you can get rid of IE completly, i thought it was still an integral part of the OS
Surely not in W7.
After doing a little research. you can remove IE from the windows features menu. However from what i understand this is a bit like just deleting all the shortcuts as it leaves the engine behind to still allow programs to use it.
DAMN YOUS MICROSOFT!
As far as I know it's impossible to remove IE due to how heavily integrated it is within the OS, which is a great shame.
Liking the look of this new Steam UI though! Think I'll be waiting until it's finished before trying it out as recently Steam's been unstable enough as it is.
(Sorry, accidently downvoted you mi1ez, i r idiot)
Must admit I've never had any issues with steam since I started with it in '05 or thereabouts...
New UI looks great though!
It is possible to remove IE from windows 7. Go the the programs and features panel, on the left click on "Turn Windows features on or off", unselect Internet Explorer 8 and press Ok.
That doesnt remove it though.
That doesnt remove it though.
It does.
No, really.
Either way, I'll give it a go once I finally get round to sorting out the steam beta. then I'll check if everything still works. The main problem I can forsee is WMP getting tracklistings...
It removes IE, I never said it removes Trident, no need to rate down things you don't understand.
Word of warning - updating to the Beta causes some games to have to be re-downloaded. I had to downloda the multiplayer portion of Modern Warfare 2 again, and have seen similar reports around the internet about it.
Still, very nice UI - for a beta I've only had two issues: response time is a little lower than I'd like, and Paypal transactions crash the built-in browser (without charging you)
finally.