VanillaGaming

As of last night, there’s a public beta of the brand new steam UI. It’s got a few kinks so I wouldn’t advise you guys update to it yet (unless you’re used to beta quality software) as my mw2 glitched out and started downloading itself again for some reason. 7Gb is no biggie for me on a 50mb connection, but if you have a capped download limit then it’s not a good thing!

There are some pics and a changelog over here, if you don’t want to install it just yet.

Personally I love it. There are a lot of improvements and I like the design, it’s simple and the typography looks great thanks to the smoothing being done on windows 7 (or vista sp2 with the platform update). Best thing without doubt though, is the browser no longer being powered by IE. Instead it’s powered by webkit (used by chrome and safari) which means it’s actually quick and standards compliant!

I really didn’t like it. It was just too big and busy for my taste. I’m used to the compact window only displaying games because that’s all i really care about. Stupid social networking aspect taking over. Was there a way to display only the games window like the current version of steam? The Library view wasn’t happening for me. :-\

I didn’t even get that far to realize they weren’t using the IE engine anymore. I uninstalled the beta as soon as I downloaded it.

There are 3 different library views now list, details or grid. None are as small as the mini-games list that was available previously, but the list view is probably the closest to how it looked before. I think the default view needs a little more spacing between the games list at the side and the content area showing hours played, friends who own it etc.

damn ilike it ima dl it asap

They fixed a few show stopper bugs last night, so it’s a little safer to try out now :) It doesn’t re-download your games anymore when you try the beta for the first time, and the browser/overlay don’t crash whilst gaming.

Sexxxxyyyy! I’m so glad they put time into developing a new UI. I was kinda hoping for new skins for the old one but this is real real nice.