Using Bloated Frameworks For Application UI Is Not Okay

The Web is great. The possibilities for building great user applications are also great.

CEF = Chromium Embedded Framework[en.wikipedia.org]

Steam Cient is an ever evolving application for all popular PC operating systems, and is a requirement that comes with many PC games which most people take for granted. Lately it's became a trend to base your application on frameworks such as CEF and Electron. This group is for end users of such applications who would like to express concerns about the way these applications operate.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of concerns.

The amount of resources Steam consumes is excessive

At default settings Steam will easily consume up to 1 GB (sometimes 2 GB) of RAM, even when none of its windows are active.
Noticeable amount of CPU is being consumed by animations and regular page loading.
Due to Steam's reliance on a lot of web elements and caching settings, the size of disk cache and the amount of files can also be a concern to many users. By default Steam will try to download the library display data for all owned games.
There is a considerable amount of various smaller issues that are different to troubleshoot and remain unsolved for years. In many such cases the complexity of the web framework is an obvious reason for the issues.

Steam does not need to work as a browser

While most interaction with the service is web-based, this should not be its main function.
Generally a user would want to see their library, install and uninstall select games. None of this should require an HTTP-based user interface.
Some other frequently used features (like Steam Chat, Steam Achievements) also don't have to rely on a browser framework.
Including a browser runtime in the application automatically makes it a subject to security risks that have to be mitigated by frequent updates to the framework itself.

CEF is not controlled by Valve

Even though the CEF project is open-source, no major 3rd party is able to seriously affect it due to its complexity.
Like most other major software, CEF is not friendly to backwards compatibility. It already dropped support for Windows 7/8.1. This means that Steam itself may require Windows 10 some day which would not be exactly adequate, considering a lot of games still run great on previous Windows OS versions.

New UI design causes medical issues

See the thread here.

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Updated: 2023-01-27

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Quick Reminder

30 January, 2023 - Liandri | 0 Comments

Thanks for joining the group.

Just wanted to let you know that you can subscribe to Discussions to get notifications about new threads, here https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/stopcef/discussions

Have a nice day.

(I'll try not to use Announcements too much)