14 DAY TRIAL // A new Steam Beta update has been released by the Valve developers, taking care of a number of issues that affected all the available platforms.
The last few days have been full of updates for the Beta branch of the application and it looks like the developers still have to make some changes to the client. Even if a number of Beta builds have already been released, the size of the subsequent versions hasn't diminished.
According to the changelog, shift-clicking and middle-clicking on links in the web views now opens a new window with the requested link, external links are now opening correctly in the community and store views, trade graphs are now being displayed in the market web pages, extra steamwebhelper processes are now longer staying around after using the in-game overlay, and when opening a link via middle-click/shift-click it will always place the new page in front.
Also, web view is no longer crashing on mouse movement if it doesn’t have high definition cursors available, only a single section is now displayed instead of showing all the sections that the games are in, and when users are adding a new category it's now possible to scroll the category list to the bottom.
The developer also explains that a couple of improvements have also been added to the In-Home Streaming feature. A regression that caused blurry / blocky images on clients with older Intel video cards has been fixed and users are now properly notified that unlimited bandwidth increases latency and is not recommended.
The In-Home Streaming feature allows users to stream games from a Windows-based PC to a Linux machine with very little performance loss. This basically make software like Wine unnecessary, but it does require the user to already have a system with Windows on it.
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. It's possible that Steam might crash or other issues could arise. This is a development release and it should be treated as such.
These improvements have been made so far only for the Steam Beta client, but they should land pretty soon in the stable branch as well.
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.