The present of the SL Viewer

The SL Viewer is changing right now.

The two viewer i’ll show you here work in a similar way, just there are big changes in the UI (userinterface).

OnRez Viewer, originally uploaded by Raul Crimson.

This is the OnRez Viewer (you can download it here) by The Electric Sheep Company. I’m using it the last few days. Well, it works quite the same as the Linden Lab “standard” viewer, the changes are mainly in the UI, but are some good changes. The Good things on it:

• IM and Friends List and Groups are in separated windows ( I hate the “Communicate” window of the LL viewer).
• There is a “History” of the places you visited, you can go back easily.
• The access to “Search” and to go to a new sim (knowing the name) is quite easy also.
• Easy to use, specially for “new residents”.
• A great integration with the Web, it opens in a window inside the viewer and works pretty good.

The Bad things on it:

• The access to the Building Tools is not easy (of course is not a viewer built for Builders).
• In the moment you connect you recieve some “Advertising” (just for a moment, you can close the window and it stops).

Second Life (Nicholaz version) Viewer, originally uploaded by Raul Crimson.

This is the Linden Lab Viewer, but with the patch by Nicholaz Beresford (more information and downloads here). It works really good, less crashes than the “standard” viewer. The UI is the same than LL one, but it fixes some bugs and separate IM and Friends List and Groups.

Personally i like both for different reasons: The OnRez one looks really nice and the integration with the Web is great. The Nicholaz Beresford version keeps the “classic” look, is quite less crashy and is something created by a resident.

I think is better you try both and use the one that fits better your needs.

UPDATE (Nov, 2nd 2007): Katarina Malthus sent me the following information, i think is important you all know:

“The OnRez viewer has a number of inworld features disabled, most of these can be easily viewed by going to the preferences menu and seeing which items are greyed out, others are feature that when toggled in the debug client menu, do nothing. I could see doing this for performance sake, but the ones they disabled (like fullscreen mode) actually increase performance. It also doesn’t seem to allow hardware overrides for video processing (antialiasing, anisotropy, etc).

In addition to this, the onrez viewer is substantially slower, and more active in processor time and network activity than the second life viewer, which for me raises questions of potential data mining.”

Thanks, Kat, for sharing this information.