Steam UI Update Rolls Out Monday

Kind of sad that they're pushing this release 'so soon'. Probably to tie into the Mac release or something, but I just feel like when it's all said and done they really only did a theme update, not a UI update. In fact it's almost a UI regression as stupid things like a button to switch between small and large modes is now gone. That's an annoying omission and really makes me think that many of the developers working on Steam don't even use their own program or are completely oblivious as to how a good chunk of their users use it. They made a number of nice upgrades, don't get me wrong, it's these little annoyances like the button that makes the experience almost worse.

Many other things needed a good update that I thought they'd get to. The friend's list needs work. You can't sort friends, names senselessly flow into names of games being played and the chat windows while at least being upgraded to remove wasted space have really had no UI improvements despite the community offering up several features that would be good improvements to the UI. None of that. My hope is that once the beta goes out they start a new beta with further updates.

Could have - actually should have done more. IMO. Again some nice upgrades, and some that are not so good.

i'm concerned at how slow the beta ran on my netbook. :(

First YouTube now Steam, in the same year. Why?!?!

The new stuff is, in both cases, worse than the old.

Hopefully they've done something about not auto-loading (albeit muted) game movies on game pages :\
Mostly I just want to see if there is a demo or check the rating and specs. If I want to watch a movie, I'll click... thanks for wasting my bandwidth for me.

I get the impression that significant elements of this UI update are intended to be more user friendly in HTPC environments. To that end I think it succeeds.

I like the new steam a lot. I wonder if beta participants will automatically be 'out' of the beta and be updated to the normal version.

You're fucking kidding right? It's nowhere near ready for release yet! What the hell is Valve thinking!?!

can we finally limit the download speed without using a thirdparty app?

1 button mini mode please, can.t believe they made this most-requested option a menu pulldown

I wish they would add back in the ability to put a game into multiple categories. That made the new custom categories a lot more useful. Now there is little incentive to make new categories.

i tried it and the new font rendering was really awful. i know other people are having this issue too, but last time i checked it wasn't addressed. really sucks

Not having a single button on the main window to switch between full and small mode was a slight annoyance at best, since it's just one extra click now that they moved it to the View menu. Logically that's where it should be, anyway. All in all though the Webkit rendering is a lot better than IE and things go faster on my system with it.

This is Valve, though, so I'm sure it's going to be tweaked further even after it's officially released. At this point there's no real reason to continue supporting both UI's, just focus on the new one and continue to improve.

I haven't tried the beta yet, but Im hoping it won't mess up my 500gb odd of installed games & mods - otherwise I'm excited

I don't like how buttons work in the new steam, they don't depress like buttons in any other application, they just have hover animations. Additionally, I wish steam would follow some good UI design lighting guides to get their gradients correct.