Steam beta adds in-game web browser support

Aol | Mail | You might also like GameDaily, Games.com, PlaySavvy, and Joystiq

BIGdownload

Send Feedback

Main Downloads Games News MMO Hub

Breaking Stories

Steam beta adds in-game web browser support

Posted Dec 13th 2008 9:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Downloads

Remember last month when we reported on a company that had released a web browser that could be surfed while still playing a game? Well we think that program is about to be rendered obsolete. Valve's newest beta client for Steam has just added their own in game web browser feature.

As you can see from the screenshot above it means you can play a game of Left 4 Dead and still check your favorite PC gaming news site. If you have Steam installed you can check out the beta release right now. Valve's official message boards has the info on how to access it. The web browser apparently uses Internet Explorer (ugh) as its basis but a Valve team member on the forums suggests they may change the rendering engine for the browser in the future. Remember this is a beta release so there will be issues.

[Via Voodoo Extreme]

Tags: steam, steam-in-game-web-browser, valve

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Hey! IE is not bad, it is certainly faster than Firefox, not as fast as Opera or Chrome though. Firefox is only good for the customization, it's rendering speed is terrible.Posted at 10:27PM on Dec 13th 2008 by Strontium 90

O rly?

http://lifehacker.com/396048/speed-testing-the-latest-web-browsers

Doesn't look that way to me.... Har har harPosted at 12:22AM on Dec 14th 2008 by Gripen40k

Firefox 3 owns IE7's ass. It's much faster and they've definitely fixed one of the only cons I've had with FF: memory hogging. It used to use up almost 300MB of memory when all I had open was 3 blogs in 3 tabs. Now it's around maybe 90MB.Posted at 8:11AM on Dec 14th 2008 by Hashbrown Hunter

@#1: how do you access our Internet from Bizzaro-world?

Seriously, though, WTF? There's a pluggable version of the Mozilla project that would have been much better suited for this.

I wonder also -- I bought the retail-boxed Fallout 3. Had I gotten the Steam version instead, I'd be able to use this overlay browser? Not cool...Posted at 4:22PM on Dec 14th 2008 by James

i think its cool to have one that is more or less standart then trying to write their own one that doesnt support shit...
yeah i had prefered opera or firefox kernel stuff but hell
as long as it works fine :)Posted at 4:35AM on Dec 15th 2008 by overflow

@4 Just use the "add non-Steam game" button and run Fallout 3 through your Steam games list. You'll get the overlay and all its features.Posted at 6:34PM on Dec 16th 2008 by Steven Wong