Hacker News Reader

> pretty poorly optimized website

What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.

View on HN

The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when) which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch. This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.

I measured an LCP or 3.5s + significant layout shift. The images are poorly optimized jpegs, instead of WEBP/AVIF. The start page takes a cool 6MB. A games page clocks in at around 12MB before the video starts loading including a whopping 4MB JS. None of the links appear to utilize preloading and it's and old school multi page app, so navigation takes a long time. I don't have a way to measure it, but subjectively it performs worse in the Steam client than in a browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com