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While Valve does have a solid track record for its work on Steam, it's still far from perfect, and the developer of the community tool SteamDB has just had to deploy a plugin-based performance fix for one of the marketplace's major features. First launched back in 2003, Steam has plenty of legacy code that holds it back in some respects, and which Valve doesn't seem to be in a rush to resolve.
Namely, Pavel Djundik just posted his new GitHub page titled "If Valve won't do it, I will," which not only hosts his SteamDB browser plugin but now also massively increases the speed and reliability of the users' Steam Profile Games pages. The creator of SteamDB was frustrated with how long it took for this particular page to load for users with large game libraries and decided to take things into his own hands.
A remarkably popular community resource, Djundik's SteamDB has been around for almost as long as Steam itself, and though some companies think SteamDB is a piracy website, this couldn't be further from the truth, as it's a simple information depository that anyone can freely reference. His development of SteamDB means that Djundik has a good sense of how Steam runs in general, and he was frustrated with hugely inflated loading times, specifically on the users' Profile Games page, which displays information about their playtime, achievements, and more. In what Djundik claims was a simple fix, he managed to reduce a 7-minute loading to a mere 10 seconds, which is a staggering improvement.
Having recently added a slew of substantial Steam shopping feature updates, Valve isn't overlooking the service by any stretch of the imagination, but Djundik's claims do suggest that there's much work to be done on optimizing Steam in general. Users interested in implementing Djundik's massive performance optimizations should look for SteamDB in their browsers' plugin stores of choice, though he did mention that it may take a bit before version 3.6.0 is approved for download.
Though the company may not be optimizing Steam as well as many hope, Valve has recently been taking a proactive stance in keeping the service as user-friendly as possible. Earlier this month, Valve banned a bunch of Steam Curator accounts that were scamming game keys out of developers. This issue yet remains with other, less prominent Curators, but at least steps are being taken to alleviate concerns surrounding the problem.
It's entirely possible that a fix similar to the one Pavel Djundik has developed officially launches in a Steam client update, but there's no telling if and when that might finally happen. At this time, Valve seems to be focused on preparing a Steam Year in Review feature, which was initially discovered by Djundik himself, thanks to SteamDB. Of course, the obvious downside to Djundik's work is that his plugin will only work when using Steam in browser mode, meaning that the official application/game launcher itself will remain unoptimized until Valve decides to do something about it.
Source: GitHub