The Lindens have announced a faster installing viewer: Project Zipper Viewer. See the SL Blog announcement: Try Project Zipper for Faster Viewer Installation.
The download is: Project Zipper Viewer version 3.7.2.286810.
I am expecting a surprise to arrive any day. This release would seem to be part of the infrastructure change needed. It might also indicate why the surprise’s arrival is taking longer than expected.
I’ll test the new install process if I can fin d the time. But, there are a number of things to play with just now. Plus there is some real life work intruding on my play time.
Besides Windows, I don’t see the interest of this project. On Linux, installation is just a matter of decompress a tar.bz2 file and on Mac to copy Second Life application from the dog archive to the Application directory (or any other one you prefer). So, where is the improvement here ?
I tried the viewer. I did not see a difference. If this install is faster then it must be at stopwatch level or on updates. Or maybe this release was originally planned for April 1.
I think they are underselling this, or overselling it, I can’t make up my mind.
Someone has told me that the real main improvement here is that the skins files is installed as a zip, instead of a shed load of individual xml files.
This seems to me to be part of a larger project, with the viewer maybe being tested to see if speed and efficiency improvements can be made via this technique.