Inara at Living in a Modem World and I, here, review viewers as do several others. There are more viewers than any of us can keep up with. I get to viewers as my curiosity moves me and as time is available. There is no single viewer that provides for all my needs. But, knowing which viewer has what features and being able to make a quick selection is a near impossibility. One has to read a load of reviews to decide. There is some help for that problem.
Atrebor Zenovka or Beach, as he is generally called, has made a comparison sheet. You can find it here: Viewer Comparison. It takes a little figuring out. You can find Beach’s Lake Bottom Lab blog here. (Note: the background on the blog is an image taken in Myst Online Uru Live.)
Best Viewer
The best viewer is a mythical creature like a unicorn. Also, the viewers are changing so fast, one can’t keep up. A chart like Beach’s becomes a major effort.
You may also notice I’m not keeping up with all the releases. Stability and performance improvements are not exciting. Lately most of the changes are minor, from my user’s perspective. I may look at a viewer and try it. But, posting there is a new release when some times there are 2 or 3 releases of a viewer in a day gets old. Also, recounting 25 bug fixes for things I don’t do gets tedious. I post about the things I would like to know or find interesting.
Summary
Lots of new stuff is coming to viewers and Second Life in general. Soon we will get more information on SL projects for 2012. How much we will learn about viewers is an open question. The viewer development team at the Lab has been in hiding for months. If that doesn’t concern you then you probably weren’t here for the release of Viewer 2.0.
Beach’s comparison list helps those that are trying to figure which viewers to try.
If you haven’t noticed, I have a VIEWERS item in the blog menu. I have several of the viewers I write about in the drop down. That makes it easy to find a listing of all the articles on a specific viewer.
If the viewer you are interested in is not in the menu, look in the left column for the CATEGORY selector. It can be used to bring up a list viewers.
I’m a little disappointed that the Cool VL Viewer is not in the drop down list of you “Viewers” button… 😛
I will fix that! I agree the Cool Vl Viewer is a top of the line viewer and should have a place there. 🙂
That it is missing is not an indication of my opinion of the viewer. I just do things as I get around to them.
Isthere a way to download this chart? Even if it is just as a pic. I would like to be able to move around in it a little easier.
It is a Google Document. It can be copy/pasted into a spread sheet.