Hacker News Reader

Comment by landofredwater | Hacker News Reader

I really wish they maintained a public API for clients rather than trying to shove a web browser in a client as they have now. You could support a theoretically infinite number of system via the API itself, even if the games aren't as playable on something like a NetBSD 2000s era machine.

View on HN

I don't think steam is interested in fragmenting their store into many clients via public APIs. Maybe they could but there isn't really a compelling reason for them to support a 2000s era machine.

What I would like from steam is the ability to zoom within their app - I can do it in a browser but in steam you're stuck with whatever desktop zoom you have in windows. It's 2023 and I can't resize the window and zoom the contents?

> "What I would like from steam is the ability to zoom within their app - I can do it in a browser but in steam you're stuck with whatever desktop zoom you have in windows. It's 2023 and I can't resize the window and zoom the contents?"

For what it's worth, this exact problem exists on Linux (and I presume Mac) as well. We have some workarounds and "hacks" for it on Linux, but none are very palatable.

Steam won't even let us use TOTP (e.g. "Google Authenticator"), obfuscating the TOTP codes for their home-grown authentication mobile app.

An API to do what? They could just offer direct download links like GOG, but most games implement at least Steam's basic DRM.

Most of the client is just HTML and CSS, the store would (I assume) still be private no matter what. It'd just be nice to be able to make custom launchers that still work with the steamapi.dll stuff

Reply on news.ycombinator.com