Why is Steam so insistent on forcing the new UI?

[Liquid Edward #KILLF2Ps]

We have seen a ton of updates almost entirely focused on this around the last year or so, and especially since the newest UI dropped. First restricting flags like -no-browser, then today getting to the point of restricting a type of file that probably less than 1% of users even know about (steam.cfg), entirely to stop less than 1% of people from reverting the UI.

I have to ask, why? The launcher gets more bloated and with less options and customization every update, and you don't get the option to revert? Not even if you have an issue, say, you can't open games on the new UI. Then you're outta luck buddy, no refunds. See where the problem arises? It's like if you had a monopoly on refrigerators, and make worse and worse refrigerators every year, then make it illegal to sell the old refrigerators. This would crash the economy eventually, but in Steam's case, it just crashes the respect people have for Valve, and their electricity bills. Steam also doesn't listen to criticism basically at all (unless you mean the mods reading reported posts), and pushes out updates from beta to everyone in less than 1 week, with bugs in them, so this thread will probably be a waste of 10 minutes and keyboard clicks.

But still, I grew up with Steam and have an account here worth about tree fiddy, so I feel I kinda have the right to care and waste my time on it.

[Haruspex]

There is no pleasing everyone.

Introduce a new UI, people complain.

If they just stuck to the old UI, people would still complain about the lack of UI updates. (You can see these complaints pre-update actually if you search. People were complaining about the "outdated" UI.)

If they made a new UI but kept allowing the option to use the old UI, well now they have to maintain multiple different variations of UI, and they certainly don't want to do that.

Instead, Valve does the best they can while working towards their goals and vision for Steam in such a way as to upset the least amount of people possible. The vocal ones you see on these forums aren't really representative of Steam users as a whole, and most users are mostly fine (or at least indifferent) with the new UI.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by Rorke:

Why is Steam so insistent on forcing the new UI?

We have seen a ton of updates almost entirely focused on this around the last year or so, and especially since the newest UI dropped. First restricting flags like -no-browser, then today getting to the point of restricting a type of file that probably less than 1% of users even know about (steam.cfg), entirely to stop less than 1% of people from reverting the UI.

I have to ask, why? The launcher gets more bloated and with less options and customization every update, and you don't get the option to revert? Not even if you have an issue, say, you can't open games on the new UI. Then you're outta luck buddy, no refunds. See where the problem arises? It's like if you had a monopoly on refrigerators, and make worse and worse refrigerators every year, then make it illegal to sell the old refrigerators. This would crash the economy eventually, but in Steam's case, it just crashes the respect people have for Valve, and their electricity bills. Steam also doesn't listen to criticism basically at all (unless you mean the mods reading reported posts), and pushes out updates from beta to everyone in less than 1 week, with bugs in them, so this thread will probably be a waste of 10 minutes and keyboard clicks.

But still, I grew up with Steam and have an account here worth about tree fiddy, so I feel I kinda have the right to care and waste my time on it.

Very few beta patches go to the stable branch that soon, unless they are hotfixes. The vast majority are usually a month later.

[NakiBest]

Mostly fine for me, but on Beta channel. :)

[Takyon]

Halloween came early. Boo!: Steam Client Webhelper (20) | 750.0 MB

Building programs out of chromium is just the new way of cutting costs and maintaining cheap interoperability. HTML developers are plentiful, cheap, and always ready to contract, and the protocol is supported by just about everything that has electricity running through it. "Just buy more RAM and more CPU cores" etc, etc.

After all, Everything's chrome in the future!

[Liquid Edward #KILLF2Ps]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Very few beta patches go to the stable branch that soon, unless they are hotfixes. The vast majority are usually a month later.

:summercat2023:

I referred to the main Steam updates that change the UI and functionality completely. I believe it was less than a week between the beta and main release of the most recent update. Either that or it was something similar. Laughably short, and they ignored all the bugs and complaints. Same thing with the one before it, and the one before before it... It gets shorter and less tested/fixed with every update.

[nullable]

Originally posted by Rorke:

Why is Steam so insistent on forcing the new UI?

They made a new UI. It's the one they plan on using, it'll evolve over time like the previous UI's people complained about. Some people thinking their complaints should move Valve to roll it back are deluded. Some people seem to think administration of Steam is some kind of democracy. No. It's Valve product and they'll manage it how they see fit. There's always going to be some unhappy users, they're often not worth entertaining.

[ZeroSorrow™]

yeah i just got forced back to the newer version of steam and its awful honestly
i know its a waste of time but i feel the need to complain anyway
its extremely unoptimized and wont ever get fixed i bet
but nobody can really leave since steam has no competition
600 MB of memory is going to what exactly?
what a joke

[nullable]

It's going to the underlying web browser embedded in the client powering all the pages. Web browsers use a lot of memory in various ways to improve performance and isolate activities. People have been whining and crying about browser RAM usage for over twenty years. Back when Firebird and Firefox were using 100MB of RAM, you never heard such caterwauling. And even though RAM amounts of increased faster than browser RAM usage people still complain incessantly every time they notice, because apparently looking at the task manager and having opinions about RAM usage without understanding modern memory management is all it takes to have a "legitimate" complaint.

All I can say is if 600MB cripples your system, you need more RAM anyway. You were already on the edge of not enough.

Feel free to code your own standards compliant browser from scratch and show all the scrubs at Mozilla and Google how it's done. Might be tougher than you think.

[Takyon]

Originally posted by ZeroSorrow™:

yeah i just got forced back to the newer version of steam and its awful honestly
i know its a waste of time but i feel the need to complain anyway
its extremely unoptimized and wont ever get fixed i bet
but nobody can really leave since steam has no competition
600 MB of memory is going to what exactly?
what a joke

To be clear why it does this is because Steam cache's individual pages from the buttons at the top and likely does so to retain back button function between "tabs" which is admittedly useful if you're utilizing Steam to that degree. But(!) if there was a way to dump or disable these things (outside having a 3rd party program do it or manually kill webhelper as needed) it would be pretty neat. A sort of "skim" option would be hugely helpful to smaller systems.

edit -- garrish english help

[Liquid Edward #KILLF2Ps]

I believe most posts here missed the point of the thread. It was about insistence on forcing everyone to use the update. To deliberately remove something like that I find indefensible. There is also something to be said about removing skins so hard that there isn't even an option on the menu, on purpose. A lot of launchers/applications are open source (this would fix almost every problem Steam has, but that is for the other thread) or have developer type options for more advanced users. I believe to remove the latter on purpose is honestly tyrannical, and the intentions are not good at all, they are just to make every Steam launcher the same, and force everyone to use bloated Chromium.
You can flamewar and keyboard war about liking the new bloated UI all you want, but this thread's purpose is to question why options are removed intentionally, and with such a strong determination from Steam to look around almost every method that appears.

Originally posted by nullable:

Originally posted by Rorke:

Why is Steam so insistent on forcing the new UI?

They made a new UI. It's the one they plan on using, it'll evolve over time like the previous UI's people complained about. Some people thinking their complaints should move Valve to roll it back are deluded. Some people seem to think administration of Steam is some kind of democracy. No. It's Valve product and they'll manage it how they see fit. There's always going to be some unhappy users, they're often not worth entertaining.

Steam's administration isn't a Democracy. It is a business. You get a product you paid for and you keep paying if you are satisfied. Steam just so happens to have a [BOARD GAME ABOUT MONEY] on PC gaming, not offer a way to play most of their games without their specific launcher, and doesn't offer refunds if you are absolutely unable to access Steam itself and your paid games (convoluted on debating this, I barely know about refunds, but I wish you could get your games DRM free in these cases). They will lose a few of their loyal fanbase, but the main public will still eat it up since they only launch it for one or two games, or don't know much about technology.
That said, their decisions are closer to Fascism than anything, and I don't throw that around as a buzzword. You have to play the game that the state gives to you, or you're just out of luck. No individuality or option to opt out of this. I would rather not have corporate fascism in my vidja gaems.
It might not be worth entertaining super hard, sure, but is it really worth it to pay your employees to track down to see how people are doing something so harmless as rolling back an update they do not like? And then removing it? I'm inclined to believe this costs about as much as the maintenance of older versions (it is the literal opposite of maintenance). Or removing the option to one of the main issues in Steam itself (Chromium)?

Originally posted by nullable:

It's going to the underlying browser powering all the pages. Web browsers use a lot of memory in various ways to improve performance and isolate activities. People have been whining and crying about browser RAM usage for over twenty years. Back when Firebird and Firefox were using 100MB of RAM, you never heard such caterwauling. And even though RAM amounts of increased faster than browser RAM usage people still complain incessantly every time they notice, because apparently looking at the task manager and having opinions about RAM usage without understanding modern memory management is all it takes to have a "legitimate" complaint.

All I can say is if 600MB cripples your system, you need more RAM anyway. You were already on the edge of not enough.

This is a slippery slope into buying more and more useless garbage. See how games went from Pokémon having 2 entire fleshed out maps in the same cartridge, to modern games all being 500 gigs despite almost no meaningful advancement in graphics.

[C²C^Guyver |NZB|]

Those command parameters that let you use the old UI are never meant to be permanent. Forcing has nothing to do with it, things get updated. That's how it works.

[Takyon]

Originally posted by Rorke:

I believe most posts here missed the point of the thread. It was about insistence on forcing everyone to use the update. To deliberately remove something like that I find indefensible. There is also something to be said about removing skins so hard that there isn't even an option on the menu, on purpose. A lot of launchers/applications are open source (this would fix almost every problem Steam has, but that is for the other thread) or have developer type options for more advanced users. I believe to remove the latter on purpose is honestly tyrannical, and the intentions are not good at all, they are just to make every Steam launcher the same, and force everyone to use bloated Chromium.
You can flamewar and keyboard war about liking the new bloated UI all you want, but this thread's purpose is to question why options are removed intentionally, and with such a strong determination from Steam to look around almost every method that appears.

Admittedly I did come out of left field about bloating just because it bothers me so much! The concept of forcing everyone onto the same exact closed environment is to make debugging and development more consistent and cost effective; by letting people have more control, that introduces more variables across systems to be tweaked and accounted for as the API is developed. It really comes down to what is the most cost effective and easiest to work with, and the chromium wave and skinless glamorized browsers was the answer. That is to say everyone needs to be on the same page or you're not allowed in.

I do have one theory on why there isn't something like a CSS editor for most chromium-based clients, and it's a bit of a crackpot one: Paywalling customization; why not find a way to monetize or closely control customizing something for some incentive? Just look at my vibrant profile, I didn't necessarily get it for free and it's the closest I can get now to customizing it. I wouldn't be surprised if companies began selling off only select style sheets across the board for profit. But that's just my funny little idea of it. I hope that has at least provided a little bit of an answer. We are talking business, and business loves money before a lot of things.

[Liquid Edward #KILLF2Ps]

Originally posted by C²C^Guyver |NZB|:

Those command parameters that let you use the old UI are never meant to be permanent. Forcing has nothing to do with it, things get updated. That's how it works.

-no-browser had nothing to do with the old UI. It removed the browser and Chromium aspect on every update Valve released until they removed it in 2022 for a silly reason.

-vgui was removed intentionally before its natural death time (it does not work at all now instead of rolling back to an older update of the new UI).

The archive of old Steam releases and removing auto-updates method was also either removed (only online support) or died a natural death, which you could give them the benefit of the doubt, but their track record is not clean in that regard.

[Liquid Edward #KILLF2Ps]

Originally posted by elbow extension surgery:

Originally posted by Rorke:

I believe most posts here missed the point of the thread. It was about insistence on forcing everyone to use the update. To deliberately remove something like that I find indefensible. There is also something to be said about removing skins so hard that there isn't even an option on the menu, on purpose. A lot of launchers/applications are open source (this would fix almost every problem Steam has, but that is for the other thread) or have developer type options for more advanced users. I believe to remove the latter on purpose is honestly tyrannical, and the intentions are not good at all, they are just to make every Steam launcher the same, and force everyone to use bloated Chromium.
You can flamewar and keyboard war about liking the new bloated UI all you want, but this thread's purpose is to question why options are removed intentionally, and with such a strong determination from Steam to look around almost every method that appears.

Admittedly I did come out of left field about bloating just because it bothers me so much! The concept of forcing everyone onto the same exact closed environment is to make debugging and development more consistent and cost effective; by letting people have more control, that introduces more variables across systems to be tweaked and accounted for as the API is developed. It really comes down to what is the most cost effective and easiest to work with, and the chromium wave and skinless glamorized browsers was the answer. That is to say everyone needs to be on the same page or you're not allowed in.

I do have one theory on why there isn't something like a CSS editor for most chromium-based clients, and it's a bit of a crackpot one: Paywalling customization; why not find a way to monetize or closely control customizing something for some incentive? Just look at my vibrant profile, I didn't necessarily get it for free and it's the closest I can get now to customizing it. I wouldn't be surprised if companies began selling off only select style sheets across the board for profit. But that's just my funny little idea of it. I hope that has at least provided a little bit of an answer. We are talking business, and business loves money before a lot of things. :tihusky:

I believe the intention of things like -no-browser and -vgui being commands instead of options is more because of not wanting to support it. It doesn't cost much money to let people use some commands on an application. If it does get very broken, then people report it, stop using, and an employee eventually removes it, which isn't as hard or expensive as maintaining it. The people who do use it are probably technologically literate enough to just not use it when it's broken, so it shouldn't be much of a problem or cost much.

[Takyon]

Originally posted by Rorke:

Originally posted by elbow extension surgery:

snip

I believe the intention of things like -no-browser and -vgui being commands instead of options is more because of not wanting to support it. It doesn't cost much money to let people use some commands on an application. If it does get very broken, then people report it, stop using, and an employee eventually removes it, which isn't as hard or expensive as maintaining it. The people who do use it are probably technologically literate enough to just not use it when it's broken, so it shouldn't be much of a problem or cost much.

Considering Spotify silently dropped M3U*/XML playlist import/export functions long ago, that is just as relevant to consider (it's a music player for god's sake, why would they do that); someone just couldn't be bothered for something that may seem minimal in the long run, despite a small minority fully enjoying it. Maybe it isn't cost effective for supporting any of these things at all, bug frequency or not.