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Comment by activitypea | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I open the Epic Store, I'm in disbelief that the company behind Unreal Engine is okay with having such a sluggish piece of software.

It has a fraction of a fraction of Steam's features, and yet feels 10x bloated. The visual response to clicking anything in the interface takes what feels like hundreds of milliseconds. It feels worse than any Electron app I've ever used, and I can't imagine why. I know that's not a main reason of why it's floundering, but I also wonder if it's a bigger turnoff for the average PC player than Epic's willing to admit.

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From a cold start, to open steam on my PC: 3 seconds for my account to connect, about 2 seconds to open and get to landing page.

From a cold start, to open Epic store on my PC: 1 minute and 19 seconds of staring at a loading bar before getting to the landing page.

An application launcher adding like 20 billion CPU instructions of overhead to every application's launch is just incompetence. And on macOS it's 34 seconds.

It's really Microsoft/Apple's fault. Their app stores come pre-installed and start apps 10 or 100 times faster, yet Steam is able to exist because you can install across operating systems, it has an identity that works across games, the sales, faster and better game discovery, and the achievements (for the people that works on).

Funnily enough, heroic games launcher - an electron app with support for multiple stores , including epic, feels faster than whatever the epic app/store is.

It's a weird world where a third party, more feature rich Linux app is more performant than the official Windows app on Windows ...

Well before Steam's latest update, it was terribad too, their web engine they used could hardly handle a simple website, but I'm pretty happy about the latest update, took them 12 years or so, so maybe Epic will get on it on 2030?

I admit I don't use the in-app browser much, but the times I have I haven't ever noticed problems opening websites. What sort of trouble did you run into?

I play a lot of games where you need the wiki, so I use it regularly. Before the new update it was slow as molasses, I don't know if it was the rendering or some memory management issues, but it was like IE 11 in experience, especially when the site has heavy javascript, but it's decent since the latest update.

I honestly feel Steam is also incredibly slow compared to just opening their site in a browser. All of these game launchers are just janky DRM and some of the worst software our industry has to offer.

This is actually really common, I don't get it really, with Warcraft 3 Reforged they swapped the UI to WEBUI because they didn't know how to use legacy FDF files.

Not only did they get rid of the cool 3d menus made with actually rendered 3d models (mdx) but they swapped them to webms instead (lost a lot of unique animations).

Anyways, the UI loads incredibly slow, it's very laggy, yet if you open it in browser, it is actually fairly smooth, what is going on? nobody can tell.

I don't understand how such a big company can mess something so simple? like okay you don't have the features but how do you make it seem so laggy?

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