Steam – Using the Steam overlay to play music/other normal browser things

steam

I have noticed that in all Steam games you can press shift+tab and then can use Steam to go to websites and stuff.

When I was recently in a game I heard someone say they were listening to Pandora radio, but when I tried it, it tells me I need to install the newest version of Adobe Flash player.

Other HTML5 versions also dont work in the Steam browser.

Is there a way to install Flash for the Steam browser?

Best Answer

As the Steam browser doesn't come with a copy of Flash, it will need to be installed manually - this can be done by following these instructions from the Steam website in your normal web browser (ie: Google Chrome/Firefox/Safari/IE).

  • Navigate to the Adobe Flash website for "Other Versions"

  • Select your operating system, for example "Windows 7/Vista/XP/2008/2003"

  • Select "Flash Player for Other Browsers" from the second drop down

  • Click the "Download Now" button to begin the download

  • Install Flash for Other Browsers

  • Once the installation has completed, you will need to restart Steam in order for the plugin installation to take effect

After following through the above steps, I was able to watch videos on YouTube. I wasn't able to test Pandora Radio as it is not available in my region but so long as it is Flash based the above should allow it to work.

Regarding HTML5 support in the Steam browser, this should be supported - the Steam browser is based off Webkit which does support HTML5. To help validate what the issue is in relation to your ability to load HTML5 content within the overlay, browse to the YouTube HTML5 status page;

http://www.youtube.com/html5

This will give you an information page which includes a small checker at the bottom which will confirm your compatibility with the HTML5 video tag, h.264 codec, and WebM;

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To enable WebM/h264 compatibility in the Steam Overlay you must use the beta version of Steam as per this thread.

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