Firestorm Viewer 4.4.0 To Be Blocked

Firestorm Logo

Firestorm Logo

 You may remember a time when there were something like 1600 different versions of viewers in Second Life on any given day. The problem with that is it so dilutes crash stats developers are hampered. There isn’t enough data on any single version to provide a developer good information for tracking down a bug.

The Firestorm Team decided they would do something to help their developers. The decision was to limit the number of versions of Firestorm on the grid at any one time to 3. They block their old viewers and prevent users from logging into Second Life with old viewers. I’m not sure if that blocking includes use on other grids.

In this case ‘old’ means not one of the current three newest versions. Currently version 4.4.0 is the fourth running version. The team is announcing that on Thursday they will block that version. There are about 5500 people using that version. They are encouraged to update now rather than wait until they’re blocked on Thursday.

See: Blocking Version 4.4.0 – 33720.

2 thoughts on “Firestorm Viewer 4.4.0 To Be Blocked

  1. I’m just now seeing this post.

    We did not choose to block old versions to make our own lives easier, or any other such reason. We did it at LL’s insistence. They really want people to upgrade their viewers to have the latest capabilities, like materials, fitted mesh, and SSA. They pushed hard for us to let *them* block older viewers – and they would block all but the *current* release. If they block a viewer, moreover, there would be no explanation displayed, just “this viewer cannot be used to log into Second Life”. We chose this route instead so we can have more control over what gets blocked. For example, LL would have already blocked 4.4.2 for Mac users, which is the last version that doesn’t have the Cocoa issues many users experience; we will not block it at all until those problems are resolved.

    I don’t know where you got the idea that we were doing it to make our own lives easier, but you might want to check with us before making wild guesses like that in the future.

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