this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Not really Steam's fault, their app is built in a chromium browser, which stopped supporting those OSes a few years ago. A perfect example of Google having too much control over the Internet. This is what happens when big companies are allowed to purchase their competitors.
Edit: people in this thread are either really forgetting how much trust google used to have with basically the entire Internet. They were seen as the "good guys" for a long time.
Or they're forgetting how unique and revolutionary chromium based desktop apps were when they first came out. It is a colossal pain in the ass to create a modern browser, if you have a web page in your desktop app like steam does, it quickly became a very difficult, time consuming, and virtually fruitless endeavor to develop a headless browser just to sit within your desktop app when you could just go with chromium.
Google (or any other browser vendor) never forced anyone to rely on a web browser engine to develop desktop applications.
This is what happens when developers make trade-offs for convenience at the expense of control.
Also in Steams’s case the pre-Windows 10 Steam user base is also tiny, and may not be considered commercially viable to support regardless.
No they never forced them but they said "hey here's this really awesome sandboxed platform that runs on almost any os, and it's a modern browser!" That's really enticing to a platform like steam where most of their app is web based. Steam isn't a desktop application, it's a hybrid application that needs a web browser. Do you know how hard it is to upkeep a modern browser? There's a reason it's pretty much only chromium and Mozilla making browsers. It's not laziness, it made sense, and Google was the only one making anything like that at the time for developers to use.
Once Google had the market share, they started making changes that they knew would affect everyone using their platform, and that's how they wanted it.
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