I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
I would go one step farther - if you're vibe coding, skip Tauri altogether. I've been on-and-off vibecoding a GitKraken replacement using egui instead, and the memory footprint is very low. Otherwise can't tell the difference, as I'm not reading the code either way.
But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right? I guess Tauri isn’t even consistent because it relies on the system’s browser and they do differ to some degree.
My friend, inconsistency is the entire point. You now have incredible power to write truly native apps that fit in with the platform and follow all the standards. The bottleneck is now you, or whoever owns each target platform and understands what native apps feel like.
Skia is the 2D graphics library used in Chromium. A number of GUI frameworks (Flutter and Avalonia) directly use Skia to do non-native platform GUIs that are consistent across platforms.
I'd imagine one can now focus on creating a client for a single OS and having the AI do the porting to others as it would essentially be a translation of sorts.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because the supporting other platforms was too laborious.
Hopefully LLM models and harnesses improve to where Chromium or Electron apps can be more trivially converted to native apps. You're paying for tokens for downstream compute efficiency across the user base.
I wonder what best practices here look like at this point. In my world, we've moved past skills for something like this, having porting helper/validator/etc things be harness level is measurably better than what skills look like right now. The open plugin spec is certainly an improvement (namely in packaging and distribution)- but, really you'd be leaving perf on the table if you were not to tune your harness. I wonder if something like dsh, pi, or other extensible (coding) harnesses have something like a concept of "harness as an extension".
The new version of Epic is based on Tauri. Also written in JS and probably React (haven't decompiled it yet) but the web runtime is part of Windows instead of shipped with the app so it takes less disk space and RAM. And you can write perf sensitive code in Rust for even more speedup.
It’s just that the vibe coded stuff has so many assumptions baked in, that you will be constantly surprised about the behaviors your slopped codebase has. Doesn’t matter for small tools, where you’ll be delighted that clicking that one label copies it to your clipboard - nice one, Claude, that’s delightful!
It’s less nice when your web app launches that other service only when the other Tailscale node is up, because the agent interpreted your prompt as a hard access rule.
Yeah I'm really impressed by what Opus 5.5 can manage.
I feel like human code is on a wide quality spectrum. The best human code is way better than what Opus 5.5 can do. But the average code, I'm not so sure.
Trust me I know what it's like. I do a lot of it. Even with Opus you still have to guide it aggressively or your codebase turns to slop.
An experienced dev with Claude is better than either of them alone but you can't just point your agent at a repo and expect good results. And when people talk about vibe coding that's usually what they mean.
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page.
Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
"Acceptable" is doing heavy lifting, because if you have a non-us keyboard layout Steam moves heaven and earth to ensure that no matter how hard you work to launch games with US keyboard, they will still use your non-US layout and be broken by default.
> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
It’s been a little while since I used Steam but you used to be able to do that from their own website, I think it was store.steampowered.com (I am guessing the website from memory). My game PC wasn’t my main PC so I didn’t even had Steam on that pc and it was what I used to buy the games - don’t really remember if I wishlist too because I use bookmarks in web browsers and folders for the bookmarks.
A launcher is a parasite mostly used to collect stats. Having it take five seconds before you even get to the point of actually starting to load your game is preposterous. Whereas who cares if it takes five seconds for a store to load? At least I play games more often than buy new ones.
I don't have a MacOS comparison point, but steam for me is pretty equivalent to the numbers in the article. ~10 seconds for a cold start, half a second for a warm start. Unless you have a very different definition of "take forever"? What are you seeing on MacOS?
I tested the latest Steam build on MacOS and it took 7 seconds to load on an M4 Max and I had to close a popup when it opened.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.
I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.
I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
If I had a performance improvement ready for release, and my competitor started bragging about being faster, I'd for sure jump at the opportunity to release it sooner.
Most likely nobody complained and startup time isn't an important metric for them. The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks.
Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.
This is such an ignorant statement. Steam works great, and has for 20+ years. If you think it's 'horrible' please explain why you have a personal issue with it.
I can honestly say I haven’t really had any issues with the client. Sure restoring from tray and starting are slow but other than that it’s been rock solid for me and for something that is mainly hosting a web view it’s nice that it doesn’t eat 1-3GB of memory in the background.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
People have wasted their time defending their platform's "honour" for decades. It used to be Sega vs Nintendo. Then it was PlayStation vs XBox. Now it's Steam vs EGS.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
Don't forget big picture mode. Nowadays Steam is a better game console than an actual game console. That's the only way I use it anymore.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
I think the "fanboyism" of Steam is a bit different to platform wars like PS vs Xbox, etc.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
Fair question, but there is a decent answer. It's because Steam is an app that is shipped to 3 platforms and at least 2 architectures; the web platform is a platform- and architecture-agnostic target; and there is an extremely large set of tools and large developer pool to pull from. It may not be the set of you trade-offs you would have chosen, but it's also a reasonable choice for the problem they are tackling with the set of real-world constraints they are presented with.
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
I was in my 30s before I understood that people say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less." I'll never understand how people can say it without wanting to claw out their larynx as badly as it makes me want to claw out my eardrums, but I'm gradually learning acceptance -- and how not to let my horror show on my face.
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
> You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
It's way more than this. Some may argue about how useful all of these features are, but Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc), a mod hosting platform, a game review site, a digital marketplace (cards and items. You may be surprised how popular this aspect is). It also does the controller remapping, manages cloud saves and screenshots/videos, allows to store games at several locations at ones. It provides games related news, checks for updates on all of the installed games.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
Disclaimer: All mine, open-source, ai-assisted, less than 5MB each. I love rust+tauri combo.
… good? I want my applications to be consistent with the platform they run on, not with their own stupidity on other platforms.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because the supporting other platforms was too laborious.
Imo it's just the only way to write software now. Opus 5.5 is better at coding than humans. Human code is slop.
It’s less nice when your web app launches that other service only when the other Tailscale node is up, because the agent interpreted your prompt as a hard access rule.
I feel like human code is on a wide quality spectrum. The best human code is way better than what Opus 5.5 can do. But the average code, I'm not so sure.
An experienced dev with Claude is better than either of them alone but you can't just point your agent at a repo and expect good results. And when people talk about vibe coding that's usually what they mean.
I'm not saying you have to be grateful to the millions of people whose work the AI you use was trained on, but why shit on them...
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
Epic could have benchmarked their beta client against the Steam beta client which would have shown this.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Proton is a great example.
It is fast though!
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
borderline murderous eyetwitch
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
How are you twisting more efficient software into a bad thing?
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.