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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

Both steam and mac app stores are html as well. It really makes sense given how easy it is to create fluid layouts in browsers, as well as how much easier it is to prototype new changes from designers.

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I find both Steam and the Mac app store a huge pain in the ass to use in their native clients.

Fine in a real browser though.

For my experience with the Steam store at least, I think it's a difference in expectations. The Steam store isn't a single-page app, it requires constant page reloads and navigates like a traditional web site. That kind of click-wait-click-wait is jarring when you're moving between more fluid navigation in the native applications running on your desktop (or the Steam wrapper around the store to launch games, etc.).

To me that's why it's clunky in the application, but fine in a browser. It's par for the course in the HTML/native hybrid application world.

There is definitely a _huge_ difference in performance for the same Steam Store pages between the app and looking at the same page in a browser. Seems like something is poorly optimized in the application.

Not to forget, in Steam you can't open new tabs which is extremely annoying.

For some reason I can't reply to winslow, so this goes here: Yes, you can open tabs. But that's rather useless (unless you want to use it as a general browser). I phrased that badly. What I meant was that you can't open links in new tabs. Which is what I'd like to do when browsing through sales or genre lists.

If you are talking about the in game Steam browser (based on chrome) yes you can open new tabs with Ctrl+T. Though their desktop version isn't meant to be a browser hence the limit to steam store and on tab.

Really? I find the Steam app on OSX awful - super slow and unresponsive. They do this in some of their games too - DotA 2 comes to mind - and it's so obvious that's not native when you're using it.

Oh I agree, the steam client is one of the worst pieces of software I have on my mac, but I don't think using html to layout the store is the source of their problems. The mac app store exhibits none of the issues I see with steam.

Not just OSX, it's sloppy on Windows too. I'm not sure what UI Toolkit they're using, but they should do a complete overhaul.

Steam is based on Valve's own custom UI Engine, the same one used by most of their games.

Something in-house, which they have no choice but to use because of the in-game overlay.

That's because it has to load content remotely. Any UI is shitty when trapped behind a huge network latency.

Especially when you are targeting a single environment with a relatively rich feature set. You can build some pretty awesome UI with keyframe animations and constraint-based (flex box) layouts if you don't have to worry about legacy desktop browsers.

What about Steam's Big Picture mode?

In my experience both have been less than optimal in terms of performance and fluidity. HTML is getting better, but it isn't anywhere near native at this point.

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