Steam’s download page has become much more informative

Valve has just released a major update for Steam that features a number of minor but important changes to the digital game store. Many of these changes have been available in beta for months, but are now coming to the software’s stable release channel. The update revises the downloads page and introduces a much improved section for managing your storage, among a host of other tweaks and fixes.

The downloads page has seen most of the improvements. To get started, in addition to showing the download progress, the page also shows the installation progress. This should reduce the frustrating times when a game appears to be fully downloaded but is not playable because it is not yet fully installed. The priority of downloads in the queue can now be easily rearranged by dragging and dropping them, and the interface generally looks much cleaner overall. The “View News” button has been renamed to “Release Notes” to make it easier to find what has changed in an update that is being downloaded, as long as the developers have provided that information.

Screenshot: Steam

Steam’s storage management section has also been improved to make it easier to view your available storage and move games between disks. You can access it by going to Settings, Downloads, then clicking on “Steam Library Folders”.

These are the main improvements, but there are a host of other tweaks and fixes included in the update, which should be available to all users now. Steam should update automatically, but you can also click “Steam” in the software menu bar, then select “Check for Steam Client Updates …” to check manually. You can see a full list of changes on the Steam website.