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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.
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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.
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The Steam client on macos is the slowest program I've used. I just uninstalled it and use the browser for store/community pages because the steam client is unusable.

I get people hate Epic, but the Steam client is not particularly well made or snappy. And I'd love to see competition kick their asses in to improving it.

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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?
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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.

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Thankfully you can turn off that news popup in the settings.
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> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.

But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game...

And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.

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"You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game..." Uh, this is exactly what I do. What's so special about an app that launches apps that it needs to be left warm constantly?
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Nothing special. It just sits there doing nothing, like many other programs in my setup. Some people start Steam on boot up.

If you don't, nothing special happens either: you just wait 7-10 seconds, hardly an eternity, and there's really no rush to firing up a videogame either. We're not talking in-game responsiveness, the only thing that truly matters.

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m5pro 64gb, 3s to get to the first 'loading window', 5s to get to the store page. But honestly who gives a shit. If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game, a 5s load of steam is not even a piece of gravel in the road let alone a speed bump. It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day. It's a useless metric.
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Standards are so low these days.

> If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game

My usecase was wanting to add a game to a wishlist

> It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day.

I've opened Steam app about a thousand times and it's always felt like clunky dated software.

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> 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.

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? I already addressed in my original comment that I wouldn't care if it was just a game launcher but the Stream app is more than that.

It opens to the store page for a reason, not to your library page.

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> It opens to the store page for a reason, not to your library page.

Mine doesn't. Mine even opens in Small Mode. These are configurable settings. If you dislike how they are set, reconfigure them. Have you also not disabled the News Window that pops up on startup? You can turn that off, you know!

> I already addressed in my original comment that I wouldn't care if it was just a game launcher but the Stream app is more than that.

Okay? Do you spend substantially more time using the Steam client to browse the Steam storefront than to play video games? Seriously?

On top of that, will five seconds of additional load time cause you to change your mind about making a purchase? If so, you really weren't interested in the either the thing you were buying or the search for that thing, and it's -very seriously- definitely for the best that you were dissuaded. Valve is making money hand over fist, so the lost sale doesn't matter to them and you get to use that money on something that you're not -at best- aggressively tepid about.

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I highly recommend just using your normal browser to navigate the store. Using it within the client doesn't really provide any advantages at all.
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My computer in the 90s used to take 30 minutes to boot. Now we complain about 10 second load times. What a world.
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A modern computer runs circles around your 90s computer... if the code was the same, it should be crazy fast. Instead, everything is a web browser, and each of them need to load 1gb of junk into memory each time you click on them.
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That's excessive even for the 90's
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