Valve is working on an update to the Steam download manager, and it looks good. The early beta screenshots show a design that is much cleaner, leaner, and more detailed, with some more vibrant colors that continues Steam's move away from its uniform grey and blue. This is not only more attractive in general, but it's much more accommodating for those with color blindless or limited color awareness, making it a more inclusive download manager for all.
The new download manager will be accessible from the game library, but you'll also be able to access it in its entirety by going through Settings > Steam Library Folders. There you'll find a UI that gives you a lot more information than before. Where now, the Steam game download process only shows the progress bar for the download itself, the new content progress details the disk allocation process, so that it's much clearer when an update is still ongoing and when it's complete.
Updates are also more detailed, so you'll know when an update is for game content, workshop content, or is just pre-caching shaders. Everyone's favorite update. In either case, that can be really useful if you are trying to decide if you should wait for the update to complete before you play, or not.
There's no progress bar for when this overall Steam update will be complete and rolled out to everyone, but if you want to have a play around with the new download manager, all you need to do is opt-in to the new beta within Steam's settings page.
What do you think of the new downloads and storage manager?
Image: PCGamer
