JSON and vector-based, heavily optimized for filesize and battery use.
People don't seem to (want to) remember, but before the run-up to the Steam Deck, Valve was really coasting.
Big Picture was riddled with bugs. Controller configuration was riddled with bugs. The Steam in-game overlay was terrible, and had been terrible for years. Their internal browser was a custom stripped down 5+ years old Electron or Chromium Embedded Framework monstrosity, begging to be exploited somehow. Chat and voice chat was terrible, didn't scale properly and was missing many of the features of things like Discord.
And things had been stagnant like that for 7 years, if not more. Their built-in browser and chat functions are still terrible. In regards to chat and voice, I hope they cave and add Discord integration, so we finally have one service for PC, Xbox and Playstation.
Their store was and is still all webviews, the pages themselves are terribly optimized and many of them aren't even controllable on the Deck without touch. You read that right, the Big Picture cursor doesn't work on some store pages, which renders them unusable on handhelds without a touchscreen / hardware (emulated) mouse.
Steam is miles ahead of the Epic or GoG UX, but it still has lots of warts.
Steam Input controller bind customization is off-the-map nuts with how broad it is now though, major props for that. And the 'new' Big Picture is a vast improvement.
When I used to live with my parents I specifically bought the physical Orange box so I could play portal and half life without having to download anything over the horribly slow and metered satellite connection.
Steam immediately forced a multi-day process of downloading and updating steam, then downloading and updating portal, before I was able to launch the game and have it crash from broken GMA950 drivers.
I buy maybe one game a year these days but I always buy it from GOG pretty much because of that experience.
I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.
It just seems to be on my PC. It's only on the store. Even download speeds seem okay. But regardless of whether I use the client, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, they all are slow for the store page. Even things like the community pages and workshop all load fine. It makes zero sense to me why things like pictures/videos in their store load insanely slow for me, yet the images in things like the workshop have zero problem.
I've been trying to figure out what is wrong for quite some time and haven't figured out what could be causing it.
Steam -> Settings -> Download -> Region
Source: I've had the privilege to ask questions to some of the engineers on that team...
I've used other sites that are fully React based that run quite well and don't have these issues. So I can't imagine it is specifically the frameworks fault.
But I do find if developers use these big frameworks and don't use them properly, the slowdowns can be much more pronounced.
Maybe I'm prejudiced to React and its variants, because I have never used a React app I liked, just React apps that are useful despite their shortcomings.
It's not a frequent occurrence, unless I have too many games installed, but then those are the downloaded games updating stuff, not Steam. Uninstall the ones you're not going to play in a while if that's becoming a problem.
If it's 1GB hard cap, you might have some bad months, but 1GB fast data and unlimited slow data is totally doable.
The people who are downvoting you must be terminally online.
Like you, I use wifi at home and work. My mobile data use is typically around 150MB/month.
I also have WiFi at my usual hangs, but thus far this month I am on 15GB of my 50GB monthly plan. Sure I could pre download music or videos to watch, but it would be much more of a hassle. And some sites, like twitch, don’t really have an option to download.
If it did not take 1 day to activate I would cancel every month and only pay when I actually have a need.
Seems, like simple efficient store and download manager should be solved issue. But what do I know...
I attempted to use Teams website once over a very low speed hotspot. It utterly failed. It just kept reloading the same resource over and over and over, maybe it didn't wait long enough? Not sure. But it never worked.
I then tried the teams app, and that was no better. It would get stuck on the main screen and couldn't go any further.
So then I tried outlook, desktop client. Total fail there as well, it couldn't seem to manage to download a couple emails.
I finally resorted to ssh and using a command line.
I feel like a old man screaming get off my lawn, but it really seems like the new programmers need to use old computers for a while and learn how to be more efficient.
smittywerben•3h ago
gowld•3h ago
prophesi•3h ago
mopenstein•3h ago
They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.
haunter•3h ago
They have monopoly on the whole unregulated digital gambling market which makes much much more
steelbrain•3h ago
wlesieutre•3h ago
some_random•2h ago
haunter•3h ago
It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1]
On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.
And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone
0, https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/
1, https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-a...
haiku2077•2h ago
daedrdev•2h ago
haunter•2h ago
I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink.
In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then)
I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price.
Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250
Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).
And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer.
Few days later bought my first gaming PC.
Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.
Ekaros•3h ago
Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.
Farbklex•2h ago
morsch•3h ago
hombre_fatal•2h ago
The PS5 ecosystem lets you buy games from your phone and your console will autodownload it for you.
Maybe the Steam store is just too big of a legacy clusterfuck to make mobile friendly. It never worked all that well even on desktop, especially on macOS. It's probably the most sluggish web app I've ever used.
esseph•2h ago
Honestly I've been a steam user for.. idk how long, 15 years?
I can't say I've ever had a major issue with it, maybe I've been lucky.
Edit: Seems to be the chat app that causes this for the author in question.
Rohansi•2h ago