Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
Me working at a garage
Customer: "My car doesn't start"
Me: "Well, can YOU make a better car???"
Customer: "Um no?"
Me: "YEAH DIDN'T THINK SO!!!"
As a general complaint. Anyone who's paid attention to the forums the past year must've been very selective to evade seeing just how many bug reports, "it's not working,help?" and discussions have been raised over the steam app/client, how buggy it is, and how buggy the overlay is.
It's a mess and plenty of stuff breaks for plenty of users on several platforms.
Users have every right to post general complaints when bug reports and help requests have already been filed in the dock loads (i've filed several detailed ones to steam, never even got a response) to no avail.
I'm with OP on this, because everything else has failed, at least post some complaints so others get an idea of just how bad it actually is for some (and those some are 'lots of') people.
This app has a single main job, work and allow launching and playing games. It's now regularly failing even that. The overlay itself crashes and hangs, blocks interaction with the game, crashes steamwebhelper, and the latter makes steam in its entirety exit on failure without warning.
tldr; we've tried everything else, complaining is the last resort, at least others get an idea of what's going on then.
That single job is indeed the only purpose I have for the launcher, but it works perfectly for me at that. Haven't had any issues downloading, installing, playing, updating or uninstalling games, nor does the overlay cause problems or do the webhelpers crash.
The only thing I noticed is that notifications aren't coming through anymore, but such things are par for the course during major events. Guess I'm used to that.
It sucks if people run into issues, it truly does, but that doesn't change that threads like these are ultimately just pointless.
good old 'works for me', i'll assume you're poking fun more than being serious (no offense, i'm giving you credit with the benefit of doubt). unfortunately it's about as common a default feature of the human mind as asking the question 'can i ask you a question?'
let's recall that the subset of users frequenting these forums is small compared to the total number of users, and the subset of users who run into a problem and file any sort of complaint is also very small compared to how many experience it.
tldr; it's a problem for a lot of people. steam's so unreliable now that i've started looking at alternatives and gone back to just wiping it and all folders when it fails and reinstalling everything - it saves time in the long run.
I wouldn't say pointless. Others see them and realize they're not the only ones. Steam staff can't entirely ignore them either, and have to quietly notice that there's a lot of issues with the product.
And anyone who scours the forums and filters for bug reports, complaints, dysfunctionality, etc. will quickly see that there's in fact been a steady stream of complaints for years. Perhaps someone will finally take notice.
Again, it's just what we do when everything else fails - at least mention it where others can see.
And it is incredibly buggy. A peek under the hood of how it's all put together makes one wonder why it's working at all, outside of systems that are inline with the particular sys specs of the devs.
With every software there will be issues for a subset of users, that doesn't indicate major problems, though. As you said, it's minorities using the forums. To try and extrapolate that might be stretching.
I am, however, curious about this buggy state people run into. And yes, being genuine.
steamwebhelper dies quite a lot, and brings down most of the app with it.
steam overlay bugs out, hangs over the game and won't respond.
hitting shift+tab while a game is very busy loading etc. stuff that tends to choke IO buffers here and there tends to make the overlay either crash or get input events wrong. i can only assume it's an issue with the gpu rendering that steam increasingly insists on using for rendering basic ui elements and stuff.
the last two updates caused steam to launch and immediately crash the overlay, then bring up an unresponsive 'steamwebhelper has stopped working: [ options ]'.
working around the above by waiting a full minute until input events were finally registered, it simply sent steam into an infinite loop of start->crash webhelper->exit steam->relaunch->crash.
those are just some i remember off the top of my head from the past month on my own system, some of them long term and some new.
input event handling for the app itself is awful, because it runs through a number of cludgy abstraction layers and the whole thing is a webapp bundled into an outdated framework with random other legacy stuff from the old steam app (pre-2012 era ish) here and there, so it has a general tendency to sort of do this:
you click somewhere and move your mouse somewhere else, if the app is busy doing something, its poor parallel processing/handling causes the app to register the input/click as happening where the mouse currently is, as opposed to where it was when the click happened.
this one has been a thing for a long time, and it clearly gets worse when the hundred abstraction layers this thing runs on get ported to other platforms than what the devs are using, because it's just too much and too complicated, and it's "over engineered" to put it mildly (it's a mess under the hood, really).
the overlay randomly dying ingame has been an issue for myself and others both on linux and windows 10 and 11 when playing left4dead2 (which as we all know, is made by the same parent company).
windows and tabs rendering to black boxes due to the gpu rendering 'acceleration', which in itself is completely unnecessary for basic ui elements to begin with. that's happening all over the place on all sorts of platforms, because.. well, gpu acceleration - it shouldn't be a thing for stuff that doesn't need that level of rendering in the first place, and it's a complex mess with too many layers (including people's particular card and driver, it's just too complex).
etc.
the notifications not working is a telling sign in itself. it's been an issue for.. how long, now? two years they've been bugging at least, either working inconsistently or not at all? and they can't seem to get their heads around fixing such a basic little thing - obviously they're not quite in the right department over there.
i really wish i could remember all the other stuff that's gone wrong. but the thing is, this app is put together with a lot of legacy stuff on top of some new stuff built on a poorly conceived precursor to the likes of electron et al (the webframework they use for all gui stuff is half the reason , and it's just too damn big a mess of things thrown together for it to ever work properly. they've chosen the wrong tools for the job. it's a micro-internet with a micro webserver and a full fledged browser that got bundled together to make a GUI instead of using proper tools for it that were meant for that stuff.
i could go on, but hopefully you get the gist of what i'm saying. just looking at search results for 'black' on the forums shows a lot of issues with black windows, and that's just an appetizer.
it's poorly made, that's why people are having issues.
That's why I'm curious why people are running into such things, while I'm not.
isn't that just a skin? those don't change the core, which is the problem in 99.999% of cases.
well tbh. i forgot to mention my favorite while at it - steam on linux sets all files in the steam folder as executable by default. since linux uses file mode to mark files as executable instead of extensions, they're all counted as executable, and if clicked by accident or entered as a local command, the files will simply be executed with whatever is in the files as system commands.
that is.. a recipe for disaster. and a very rudimentary/noobish and easy to avoid mistake. and something devs tend to get an earful for in production circles. point is though, it's not something you'd find anyone doing if they know what they're doing or pay attention to detail - you have to screw up pretty badly to put it into production and then not care.
sent them some bug reports on it, but of course there has been zero response. even though it's such an easy fix a single person can get it done in an hour. one of several things making it evident they just don't care much and are sloppy with the app.