Valves Roll Out Big Steam Update With UI Refresh, Redesigned In-Game Overlay & Notes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valves Roll Out Big Steam Update With UI Refresh, Redesigned In-Game Overlay & Notes

Following recent Steam client beta updates that have introduced many new features, Valve tonight rolled out a rather big Steam client update to stable users...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Client-Major-Update

[AmericanLocomotive]

Yay, now the entirety of Steam has been converted to a giant crappy web-app running in Chrome. New Steam currently sitting here using 1GB of RAM with a single chat window open, and 1-2% CPU perpetually despite the main window being closed.

Brilliant Valve, brilliant.

[gQuigs]

I just upgraded -before the upgrade Steam was at 950MB and now it's over 1.1GB.. so yes more.. but not a crazy amount more. (Btw, when did it get using so much memory!)

I am however not noticing any performance improvement.. yet..

[Namelesswonder]

Yay, now the entirety of Steam has been converted to a giant crappy web-app running in Chrome. New Steam currently sitting here using 1GB of RAM with a single chat window open, and 1-2% CPU perpetually despite the main window being closed.

Brilliant Valve, brilliant.

Steam's been a memory hog for well to a decade now since they began using CEF, but it only got worse 4 years ago when they changed the library view to being in a WebView and rendering a bunch of stuff. Enabling the low performance option and disabling community content did not do much to change memory usage.

Memory utilization can however be brought down 200-400MB by changing the library view mode to small mode and restarting Steam. You used to be able to go all the way down to few hundred megabytes by setting an argument to not spawn any CEF processes, but they removed that a while ago.

But the new UI isn't bloating Steam anymore than it already was. Before I took the update Steam was using 1.2GB, and after updating it's still only using 1.2GB. CPU utilization is still the same as it previously was.

My main gripe with the new UI is that the status of background shader compilation is no longer shown, so you can't tell how far along it is on games with massive shader caches.

[rmfx]

Finally!
The client started to really show its age.
I hope they clean the internal directory structure too.

[Alexmitter]

It is somewhat sad that they do not want to continue using their absolutely funky source engine based UI framework because it was just so unique. CEF is a lot better then Electron which all the others use, by a long shot. So far I quite like the interface.

[Aggedor]

Looks like the UI no longer hangs under Wayland, when both the main window and a chat window are open at the same time. So glad that's finally fixed!
It also feels a lot snappier overall.

[EvilHowl]

Yay, now the entirety of Steam has been converted to a giant crappy web-app running in Chrome. New Steam currently sitting here using 1GB of RAM with a single chat window open, and 1-2% CPU perpetually despite the main window being closed.

Brilliant Valve, brilliant.

Yet it's better than what the Epic Games' launcher will ever be.

[timofonic]

Yet it's better than what the Epic Games' launcher will ever be.

That's setting an extremely low standard, from my humble point of view. Even ChatGPT or an human monkey coder can do it a lot better than (Not So) Epic Launcher.

WebApps are crap, they are stupid and inefficient.

[luno]

Looks like the UI no longer hangs under Wayland, when both the main window and a chat window are open at the same time. So glad that's finally fixed!
It also feels a lot snappier overall.

is it directly working on Wayland or still Xwayland ?