No not a viewer release. Jessica has posted on the Firestorm blog about what is going on with Firestorm and their development effort. See: Status update.

New Firestorm Region in OSGrid

In my Kokua article: Kokua Beta Status & Review, I wrote about the rates that developers were releasing versions of their viewers. Jessica is explaining their release philosophy and how that will be changing.

Included is a list of coming features in the next release. Some we have seen in preliminary versions in other TPV’s. I expect the Firestorm release to have features with more polish and improved user interface.

The Team is also focusing on stability. Firestorm is currently the most stable viewer used with Second Life™. Jessica says they have even more stability fixes.

OpenSim compatibility is apparently going to be an issue. Jessica qualifies their support for OpenSim grids. As the OpenSim community fragments into grids with special features and changes, it becomes harder to remain compatible with all grids.

Jessica points out that those grids will have to put some effort into helping with compatibility. They will need to provide the viewer developer community code to help out with their special features. I can see the necessity for that call.

So, while the Firestorm Team is committed to maintaining compatibility with the basic OpenSim grid it remains to be seen how compatible grid operators are going to be. Nothing is said about Aurora.

The Team is working with the US Military to improve the security on OpenSim grids that the military uses. The code created by the military is going into the Firestorm open source repository for use by all OpenSim users. I think I got all that correct.

The Firestorm team now has two regions in OSGrid. One region has the novel name: Firestorm Island. The opening image is a picture of the region.

Automatic Updates

Reading the post I get that updates, hot fixes, and other changes to the Firestorm viewer are being moved toward automatic installs. The user will not be required to do anything to update.

So far, I’m not a fan of the Lab’s implementation of the automatic update feature. In most of my copies of the Lab’s viewers I have the feature turned off. I don’t like a sudden change in my viewer’s behavior. I don’t know what has caused the change. Did the viewer update? The Windows OS? My anti-virus? Is my network connection going wacky?

Answering questions in the SL Answers part of the forum I find new users coming in saying, I didn’t change anything and suddenly I am crashing. Right. They have everything on auto-update; anti-virus, SL, their OS, Flash, iTunes, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, … and at anytime any one of them can tweak the computers graphics.

We’ll see how well Firestorm implements the updating features. Theoretically it should work just fine. If everything worked and all things in the computers worked as intended, yeah I do think it would work. I just don’t trust my computer updates to anyone because too much stuff simply does not work as intended.

I use the anti-virus updates and critical Windows updates because of the zero day attacks being mounted by the Chinese and Iranians.