Steam Beta Fixes Friend Notifications and Speeds Up the Quick Access Menu

Valve shipped a new Steam client to the Preview/Beta channel on Wednesday, October 28, two days after its October 26 beta. This one is short and focused mostly on friend notifications, which have had a few rough edges.

What changed

Valve’s notes list these fixes and improvements:

• “Friend joins a game” notifications no longer get dropped when several friends start games within 10 seconds of each other.
• The sounds for “When a friend comes online” and “When a friend joins a game” now respect the “Show Notification Toasts” and “Play a sound when a notification toast is displayed” settings. Before, they could play even with those turned off.
• Per-friend notification settings were sometimes ignored. They now work, and they correctly override your global notification settings in all cases.
• The Quick Access Menu is more responsive.
• In Desktop Mode, the Steam updater window has been restyled.

Who gets it

This is a beta client, so you only get it if you’ve opted into the Preview/Beta channel in Steam’s settings. On a Steam Deck or another SteamOS device, that’s under System settings. Stable Steam users will see these changes later, once Valve promotes them.

There’s still no new SteamOS build to go with it. SteamOS stable, beta and preview all remain on 3.9.5 from October 23.