The Steam overlay is broken again... (workarounds included!)

So Chromium 115 has hit and with it goes the reliable workaround of using the --disable-windows10-custom-titlebar command line argument. While the titlebar will now be fancy and respect the users Windows theme, it also comes with the same set of issues.

NWjs Steam Overlay issues (v0.78.0+):

1. Fully covered window titlebar (overlay renders above or below it)
2. Broken titlebar features when overlay enabled (e.g. drag, close, minimize...)
3. Titlebar overlay "ghosting" after closing it

Known Workarounds (15th Nov 2023):

1. [Unresolved]
2. [Unresolved]
3. Use "Set Title" NWjs plugin action (e.g. combine with "On overlay deactivated" condition and repeat action for 5sec)

I'm not that active anymore and can't provide help for all NWjs and Steamworks related features like in the past. I'll periodically play around and see if I can find better solutions for this specific issue.

This seems to be a roadblock that cannot be worked around. Webview2 could become a solution in the future when it's ready for multi-platform distribution but the NWjs side of things looks pretty bad.

It would either require Valve to add very specific support for "fake" Chromium window titlebars or Chromium to offer a version of their custom titlebar that integrates with the native Windows DWM.

Their recently added Windows 11 mica titlebar support doesn't seem to fix this issue either and it would be useless on Windows 10 anyway. NWjs will probably never support Mica to be begin with but it was worth a shot I suppose.

TL;DR:

• Valve: Doesn't care enough to implement specific workaround.
• Google/Chromium: Doesn't care about issues for 3rd party projects that use their browser engine.

The Steam overlay is usually not picked up by streaming software anyway. So it's only a slight inconvenience for players who prefer playing in windowed mode for the time being.

After some further experimenting around. I could unfortunately still not find any workarounds for these issues. I'll provide the most stable working older release below, for people who need it.

NWJS Release Version: v0.72.0 download (e.g. "nwjs-sdk-v0.72.0-win-x64.zip")

• No support for MacOSX ARM
• Supports --disable-windows10-custom-titlebar for the old working titlebar
• Requires --disable-features=Vulkan for Linux to work (see issue)
• Isn't affected by the titlebar missing icon bug (see issue)
• Requires custom prebuilds for Steamworks 1.58a to work (download here)