14 DAY TRIAL // A new Steam Beta update has been made available by Valve and it looks like the developers are still finding things to fix and features to implement.
Valve has released a new Steam Beta update for all the supported platforms and the latest changes brought into the client are quite interesting.
This latest development cycle for Steam has to be one of the longest so far, and numerous Beta updates have been made. Lots of features have been added, but a large number of fixes have been implemented as well. It appears that users will have to wait a little more for the stable version of Steam.
According to the changelog, bad page loading in the client, if you hit the right combination of menu and back button presses, has been fixed, an occasional crash that occurred when loading new web pages as a popup has been fixed, a crash that happened when a page tried to present a JavaScript prompt dialog has been corrected, a glow effect has been added on hover, a rare streaming client crash has been fixed, and a black screen that occurred when streaming D3D8 games has been corrected.
Also, a crash that occurred when launching the Big Picture mode without a sound card has been fixed, the software decoding performance has been improved, flashing and low framerate when streaming Dark Souls II have been corrected, the Enter key is no longer being activated twice in web views, and a rare bug that was causing high CPU usage in the steamwebhelper process has been closed.
This is the Steam Beta branch, which means that users will need to open Settings and choose the Beta option in order to get these latest changes. You will be prompted to restart the client and then you will be able to run the new Beta build.
You have to keep in mind that after you change to the Beta channel, the application will no longer be stable. You might experience various problems that haven't been fixed yet or other unknown issues. If that is the case, just open the Settings menu and switch back to the Stable branch by opting out of the Beta.
If you don’t have the client, you can download the Steam for Linux installer from Softpedia. This is not the actual application, but a small tool provided by Valve that downloads the actual software and takes care of any dependencies.