Idk if this is slop, but it's funny

You think they only waited for epic to drop an update as if they monitor them from the inside?

That's a next level conspiracy theory lol

Has it? I never noticed. It always been fast for me. 2 seconds is too long?

From what others said, this has been in the beta. Epic tried to beat this release just to be able to technically say they were faster for a day.

Avoid stealing focus when the Steam main window opens, if another window was activated during startup/login.

Holy hell finally. This has annoyed me for so damn long.

Honestly, that makes it even better to me. Here’s Epic bragging about beating Steam in some way meanwhile Valve’s like “here’s a little something we’ve been working on for a while. No biggy.”

And to add to that this was already part of the Beta update from 9. September

Going forward we optimize for "restore from system tray" time. That'll be a game changer.

It didn't really bother me before, but it has been kind of slow to start for a long time. Bad enough for me to notice that's it's slow, but not bad enough to feel the need to complain about it.

Now it only takes about 6 seconds for me which is perfectly fine. As someone who only runs Steam when I'm about to play a game through it, it's a very noticeable improvement!

I don't get this mentality. Every little performance optimization matters. It might save 1s or even less for you, but coupled with hundreds of thousands of users, it saves a some amount of CPU time.

This is why competition is good. Being blindly loyal to a brand and defending their shit only benefits the companies.

Because not everyone is you?

Also devices like steam deck and steam machine.

Its not a random update in response to Epic.

The September 9 beta branch mentioned improved start up time.

Steam quietly improves itself without making big announcements calling out other companies to try to get attention. Its why it has been working on stuff like Proton, steamos, and hardware.

This isn't a case of competition though; Valve didn't slip in a last second speedup to get back at Epic, the patch had already been built and tested and just happened to come out a day after Epic's did.

Both of them are using a form of embedded Chromium to display the store, no?

Yes, but only for the store I think. There are also other game views you already own and other features too that is not displaying a store.