News New Steam UI goes into open beta

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/02/24/new-steam-ui-goes-into-open-beta/1

Valve has pushed out a new beta of the Steam client, which unveils an entirely new UI.

 

Looks good but it's really buggey atm - keeps trying to re-download MW2 multiplayer for example.

Will be great when it's finished and out of beta but until then i'll have to stick to the non-beta client as i dont like re-downloading games for no reason.

 

Don't install this. It deletes a lot of game data for some games. Currently affected are:
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
Company of Heroes
Race 07
Source SDK
HL2
Borderlands
Left 4 Dead 1
Mare Nostrum

Dangerous!

 

"streamlined"? Don't make me laugh.

The new UI is awful - Ugly, poorly designed and clunky.

Went back to current UI after 30 minutes because the "library" wouldn't behave itself. The UI change is not needed, and at least for me, wanted.

 

My menus, don't have a thing... they open but there aren't any words... Can't roll back to the "normal" UI

 

Steam = Fail!

 

Looks Like XBMC i Like it was just wondering when an update was coming through

 

Annoying, yes. Dangerous? Not so much. Once they re-downloaded they worked fine.

There's a hell of a lot of other bugs showing up as well, but guess what - it's a beta! And from Valve of all people. You didn't expect it to be all plain sailing, did you?

Personally, I love the look of the new UI, but cosmetic changes aside the biggest and most important change is the switch from IE to a Webkit-based browser. For this reason alone it's 1000 times better than the old UI.

 

Just go to the news section and click the link to the beta settings in the right hand side. it'll open the settings menu and you can select the opt-out option. i had the same problem and that's how i reverted to the old steam.

 

Yeh, I guess it's not that bad. Glad I had a steam backup

 

Here's a fix to the menu's problems

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1159344

It's post #10

 

Yeah, turned it on this morning & it started re-downloading MW2

 

Having the same issue with MW2 multiplayer. I tried to switch back to old style but said files were corrupted. Downloaded from scratch and working fine now.

If anyone is having an Issue with the in client browser not displaying pages or your getting a "testshell-error", here is a something that may solve it:

" To fix you need to open IE8 then go Internet Options->Connections->LAN Settings and UNcheck the automatically detect settings button. This worked for me using Win 7 Ultimate x64."

 

Absolutely loving it, they have corrected all the problems that made me hate Steam, no IE dependence any more (<3 WebKit), much faster response time and generally less cluttered and easier to get to things, plus the different views for the library are a huge improvement.

 

Loving the new UI.

Much faster and much better laid out than the old one.
I'm especially liking the new library and download monitor, though they still have the issue where some games will randomly set themselves into 'update - paused' mode

still very much in beta though, most of the web-browser bits are broken for me (get a blank page with 'testshell-error:' in the URL bar for the store and community pages at the moment)
Edit: from the steam forums it's broken if automatically detect settings is left enabled in IE

*sigh* IE still breaks things even when you're not using it

 

I'm definitely glad to see the back of IE for it and hope the new system works out. I have run into one problem though - I have a remote session set up to one of my machines at home, and a fairly frequent use of that is to buy and download Steam games that I then back up, and reinstal onto my games machine when I get home from work.

Only problem is the new interface is ungodly slow on it

However, thats a fairly specialist use so I can't really hold against it too much.

 

New ui looks worse then the old one. This is pretty rare, especially for Valve. Oh well. I at least hope they will either leave an option to use old ui (which looks good. no need to change it), or just improve this one.

 

I absolutely love it. Had no problems with needing to redownload anything. It's a keeper!

 

^^ This. I sent an email to Valve a couple months ago since I've uninstalled IE - whenever I get a link I couldn't load it, not even the damn screenshots of games. This sound much better, and I'll put up with other changes.

I would however like the games list to have an option to go back to the old style, or at least something smaller. The smallest style now takes up as much screen space for one game as 2 or 3 games would have in the old UI.

 

I really like the new Steam much better functionality for me in terms of displaying games, I have over 160 so it was actualy becoming an issue.

Streamlined and shiny there are a few things I don't like such as the new list system being pretty much pointless without a quicker way of adding games to it.

Unlike a fair few of my friends I never lost my friend list or had many games deleted though Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts felt the need to redownload more than 1gb when the switch happened. I suspect it was because I wasn't online at the time.

I do find it uses over 128mb of ram when launching a game and can use even more when I quit but that may just be a bug. Overall I'm happy with it and it certainly needed an overhaul of some kind I have no problems with substance over style (Mumble>Teamspeak/Vent) but a bit of flash and dazzle never hurt anyone.