New Steam UI approaching

Hey! Steam interface bogging you down since 2003? Does it depress you that it hasn't really changed at all in the following 7 years?? I guess you (and I) are in luck, because Valve is finally redesigning the UI, and doing some other pretty significant back-end work for their Steam digital delivery/community/multiplayer/store thingamajig. As I implied on the post title, this new UI is not out yet as is, but you can opt-in for the beta right from your Steam app. Just head to settings, and choose the UI update from the beta participation drop-down menu, right in the account tab. This will prompt you to restart Steam, at which point it will update to the beta. Couldn't be easier.

The first thing from the list of changes that really stands out to me, aside from the shiny new look, is that they have finally gotten rid of the Trident rendering engine dependency. For those who are not in the loop, that means Steam will no longer use Internet Explorer to display their shit in. Before, for example, if you would browse a gallery of screenshots through Steam, it would open in a window that would say Internet Explorer on it. This is no more. Their new rendering engine is based on WebKit, which also powers Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers, so that side of things is in good hands now.

Anyone who knows me probably also knows how I feel about web standards, Internet Explorer, etc etc, so I'm all for this change. The major UI changes that come with it is a bonus, but not why I'm excited about this. If you feel like there is something that you don't like about it, you can click the neat button on the upper right corner that says beta on it, which redirects you to the support forums. I'm not entirely sure, but you probably need a separate account for the forums (NOT your Steam account) to actually post in there, but if you really want to get yours heard, that's the way to do it. But keep in mind that this is beta, so if you are uncomfortable with such things, maybe it's not for you, yet.

Here's a little shrunken down image of one of the possible ways that you can use to view your (or mine, in the case of the image) game library now. Click on the image to check out the full list of changes and a scrolling slideshow of other screenies of the interface.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on February 24th 2010 at 1:19pm