Many of the cases found in the steam client itself are in places where CEF is not available but the client still needs to display a GUI of some sort. For example the update screen:
For a long time, VGUI was the primary gui abstraction Valve used in all their games and the steam client. Valve stopped using this system in 2023. For this change, Valve stripped out almost all vgui from Steam's codebase and replaced it a web based gui powered by Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF).
However, this transition was not absolute, as there are still many places where VGUI still shows up throughout the steam client. The goal of this site is to document all the places where VGUI still shows up. It's meant as a fun exploration into some interesting relics found throughout the software.
This list only covers the instances I have personally found of VGUI Showing up. a
Many of the cases found in the steam client itself are in places where CEF is not available but the client still needs to display a GUI of some sort. For example the update screen:
Another case where CEF is not available is when CEF itself has crashed, and the steam client asks the user what they would like to do
In the overlay, valve has done a far less thorough job of removing VGUI. Even after they revamped it in 2024. The first example we will explore is the old file selection dialog when saving a screenshot. This may be found by right-clicking on the screenshot, pressing "share...", then "Save Image..."
The next instance shows up when a browser opens a pop-up window. Instead of opening in a new browser of the same style it instead opens up one in the older VGUI style.
Anyways these are the four examples I've found so far. There's probably more idk.